CBS News recently published a story, “2025 was so hot it pushed Earth past critical climate change mark, scientists say,” from the Associated Press (CBS/AP), claiming that a recent temperature “blip” has pushed the planet past the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold, implying that catastrophic consequences are now unfolding or inevitable. [some emphasis, links added]
This is false.
Earth has passed that politically chosen temperature hallmark with no disastrous effect and is now cooling. Also, no data support the claims of increased severe weather consequences matching the short-term temperature increase.
The article states that 2025 was among the hottest years on record and that a three-year average “broke through” the 1.5°C limit, warning that staying below this mark “could save lives and prevent catastrophic environmental destruction.”
The story relies a great deal on rapid-attribution outputs from World Weather Attribution, suggesting that specific extreme events in 2025 were far more likely because of climate change.
Their implication is clear: crossing 1.5°C is a critical line, and dire outcomes should now be expected.
But a short-term temperature spike, especially one based on a three-year average, is not climate, and it certainly does not validate years of catastrophic predictions tied to the 1.5°C number.
What CBS/AP also ignores is the fact that since the peak in early 2024, likely induced by huge amounts of water vapor injected into the atmosphere by the Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption, global temperature has been trending downward, as seen in the graph below.
Climate is defined and assessed over multi-decadal periods, typically 30 years, specifically to smooth out short-term variability from El Niño, La Niña, volcanic aerosols, and other natural influences. A brief overshoot during a warm phase does not establish a new long-term state.
As importantly, Climate at a Glance: “Tipping Point: 1.5 Degrees Celsius Warming” explains that the 1.5°C threshold is a policy target, not a scientifically established threshold beyond which climate disaster looms.
In short, the 1.5℃ target was chosen by politicians to drive policy action and never represented a physical cliff beyond which the climate system suddenly collapses.
That distinction matters because for years the public was told that passing 1.5°C would unleash unmistakable, escalating disasters. Yet when global averages have briefly touched or exceeded that level in recent datasets, the promised cascade of unprecedented impacts did not materialize.
Hurricanes have not suddenly multiplied, floods did not surge globally, and agricultural output did not collapse.
On the contrary, long-term records summarized at Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes and Climate at a Glance: Floods show no clear global increases that would confirm the article’s apocalyptic framing.
This is why critics have long argued that 1.5°C functions as a moving rhetorical goalpost rather than a scientifically demonstrated tipping point.
CBS/AP also amplifies claims that extreme weather in 2025 proves the danger of crossing this threshold, but those claims rest on model-based attribution rather than observed long-term trends.
Climate Realism has documented the weaknesses of such attribution studies in multiple analyses, including its coverage of World Weather Attribution claims, showing how probabilistic model outputs are routinely presented as settled fact while observational uncertainties are minimized or ignored.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6) is far more cautious, assigning low or medium confidence to many asserted global trends in extremes and emphasizing regional variability and uncertainty. Later references to IPCC AR6 in media coverage often omit this caution.
What the CBS/AP piece also leaves out is historical context. The climate system has always exhibited variability, with warm and cool phases layered atop longer-term trends.
Selecting a recent warm spike and declaring a “critical mark” crossed tells readers little about where the climate will settle over the coming decades.
While warming has occurred since the late 19th century, the rate and impacts vary substantially over time and region, undermining the idea of a single, universal danger line.
Finally, the article’s sense of urgency ignores a crucial real-world metric: outcomes. Despite rising global temperatures over the past century, climate-related deaths have declined dramatically due to improved infrastructure, forecasting, and energy access, a point documented at Climate at a Glance: Deaths from Extreme Weather.
Deaths related to non-optimum temperatures have also fallen dramatically as the Earth has slightly warmed, in part because cold weather kills more people than hot temperatures. If crossing 1.5°C were truly the existential turning point portrayed, one would expect the opposite trend.
By treating a short-term temperature blip as proof that a “critical climate change mark” has been breached, CBS/AP misleads readers about how climate science actually works. The 1.5°C figure is a political benchmark, not a physical tipping point, and brief excursions above it say little about long-term climate outcomes.
The fact that nothing resembling the predicted catastrophes occurred when the threshold was touched suggests that CBS/AP is engaging in doom-mongering rather than journalism.
Read more at Climate Realism
