• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

Meteorologist Debunks CNN’s ‘Mann-Made’ Claims About Climate-Driven Heat Waves

CNN relies on flawed models and cherry-picked data, ignoring history and urban heat effects.

by Anthony Watts
June 25, 2025, 8:33 AM
in Extreme Weather, Media, News and Opinion, Politics, Science
Reading Time: 6 mins read
A A
1

Hot sun hangs over city.
In the article “Heat waves are getting more dangerous with climate change — and we may still be underestimating them,” CNN boldly claims that human-induced climate change is making heat waves “more common, intense and longer-lasting,” and that we are likely underestimating the risk. [emphasis, links added]

This is false, refuted by actual long-term temperature records.

The available evidence suggests that while urban areas do experience warmer nights due to the well-documented Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, there is no global trend of increasing heat wave frequency or intensity after accounting for urbanization, data quality, and the selective reporting that plagues much of the mainstream climate narrative.

CNN does briefly acknowledge that overnight temperatures are increasing in towns and cities, pointing to the UHI effect as a culprit. However, they conveniently skip over the larger implication: these localized temperature increases are not evidence of a trend attributable to climate change.

They are a function of sprawling urban development, including asphalt, concrete, and waste heat from human activity, rather than a signal of global warming, much less a planetary crisis.

Studies show that rural temperature stations, far from the heat-retaining concrete jungles, do not show the same rate of warming as urban stations.

Climate at a Glance: U.S. Heatwaves presents historical data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which shows that heat waves were far more severe in the 1930s than they are today.

The number of days exceeding 95°F in the 1930s far surpasses anything seen in recent decades, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The annual mean number of days with a daily maximum temperature ≥95°, ≥100°, and ≥105° each at 828 NOAA USHCN stations with at least 100 years of daily temperature readings between 1895 and 2023. Graph by Chris Martz from NOAA data at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/

Both the intensity and frequency of heat waves were much worse nearly a century ago. CNN chooses to ignore this broader historical context.

In addition, multiple articles on Climate Realism demonstrate that the mainstream media loves to focus on short-term spikes and isolated events while completely disregarding the cooling trends and the full historical record.

One article, “CNN Ignores Long-Term Data, Claims Heat Waves Are Becoming More Severe,” shows how CNN conveniently glosses over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s data, which contradicts their claims, by showing that heat waves were far more prevalent and severe during the 1930s and the 1950s, for example.

CNN’s article leans heavily on attribution studies, particularly those from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project, which claim that today’s heat waves are made “tens to hundreds of times more likely” by climate change.

These studies are based on climate model simulations, not observed temperature data or trends. The issue with attribution models, as thoroughly discussed at Watts Up With That, is that they often start with the assumption that most warming is due to human activity and then “discover” that warming in their results.

It’s a classic case of confirmation bias wrapped in scientific jargon. In logic, this is referred to as a logical fallacy, in particular, affirming the consequent.

Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked previous attribution “studies” produced by WWA in the past here, here, and here, for example.

To support its assertions about worsening heat waves, CNN sought out the opinions from noted long-time promoters of climate alarm, Friederike Otto and Michael Mann.

Otto, director of the WWA, told CNN that “every heat wave that is occurring today is hotter than it would have been without human-induced climate change.”

What else would Otto say? After all, she runs the organization that’s making the extraordinary heat-wave claims, claims not supported by real-world data.

Her sweeping statement is not grounded in hard, observational data but rather in models that have a known tendency to run hot, consistently projecting more warming than actually observed.

The fact that these models can’t even accurately predict regional temperatures or temperature trends, much less individual heat waves, is conveniently omitted from CNN’s coverage.

Mann warned CNN that “climate models are likely understating the relationship between climate change and persistent summer weather extremes today and under predicting the potential for future increases in such extremes.”

So for Mann, flawed models that project more warming than is occurring are understating heat wave occurrences and severity. Yet increasing trends of either can’t be found in the data.

If anything, the observed evidence suggests that the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions on heat waves is overstated by the climate models WWA uses, not understated.

Even the sensationalized claims about European heat waves fall apart under scrutiny. As pointed out by Climate Realism, these events are well within the range of natural variability.

When past temperature records are carefully reviewed, we find that similar or even more extreme heat events occurred long before industrial CO2 emissions began to rise substantially.

Moreover, CNN recycles the tired trope that heat waves are becoming more “deadly.” Yet, global data consistently show that climate and temperature-related deaths have plummeted over the last century, even as the population has quadrupled.

Bjorn Lomborg has repeatedly illustrated, using data from the International Disaster Database, that deaths from weather-related events—including heat—are down by over 95% since the 1920s, thanks largely to better infrastructure, forecasting, and adaptation. See Figure 2.

Figure 2. The graph demonstrates a vast improvement in human mortality related to all extreme weather events over a 100-year span from 1920 to 2021. Source: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, data from the International Disaster Database published in ScienceDirect

CNN often relies on “rapid attribution studies,” as it does almost exclusively in this piece, yet such studies are not real studies in the traditional sense, nor are they peer-reviewed in the traditional sense.

Attribution studies are rushed out rapidly in the hours or days following an event, to push the narrative that climate change is responsible for a particular incident.

They are not careful analyses, examining whether climate change played a role in the event. The latter type of study takes time and detailed research, not the click of a button on a computer, with the built-in assumption that climate change contributed to an event, with the only question being how much.

Attribution “science” is not science at all as it is currently constituted; rather, it is a tool designed to reinforce a narrative, not to objectively investigate the cause of weather events.

Recent heat events pale in comparison to the extended heat waves experienced during the “Dust Bowl” decade of the 1930s and extended heat waves in the 1950s. The cherry-picked comparisons CNN uses actively distort the public’s understanding of climate and weather history.

This isn’t the first time CNN has played fast and loose with climate data. They’ve been called out before, including on Watts Up With That, for exactly this type of fear-driven reporting that ignores long-term records in favor of flashy headlines.

CNN’s persistent misrepresentation of climate data suggests that accuracy is less important to them than sensationalism. Perhaps that’s because fear sells, but it certainly doesn’t inform.

Ultimately, CNN’s reporting here is a disservice to public understanding. Their reliance on shaky models, their neglect of historical context, and their failure to address the well-known Urban Heat Island effect all point to an agenda-driven narrative rather than serious journalism.

If CNN truly cared about informing its audience, it would have corrected these errors by now. Instead, they keep peddling the same fearmongering stories, perhaps because admitting otherwise would undercut the very crisis they’ve worked so hard to sell.

Read more at Climate Realism

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…

Popular Posts

News

Scientific Bombshell Undermines The Climate Doom Narrative

Oct 23, 2024
Electric Vehicles (EVs)

The ‘Green’ Scam Of The Century: How ‘Renewables’ Increase Fossil Fuel Demands

Oct 23, 2024
News and Opinion

Antarctica Is Colder, Icier Today Than At Any Time In 5,000 Years

Apr 15, 2024

Comments 1

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 months ago

    The Crumby News Network is proven once again to be the typical Leftist Propaganda its always been and always will be

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • COP30 Amazon17 Republican AGs Urge Trump Admin To Skip COP30 Over Green Energy Policies
    Oct 24, 2025
    The attorneys general say attending COP30 would back costly, unreliable wind and solar and risk U.S. energy security. […]
  • severe storm over cityClimate Expert Reveals Latest Scandal Tied To Billion-Dollar Disasters
    Oct 24, 2025
    Climate Central takes over the Billion-Dollar Disasters tabulation, sparking fresh controversy over its methods and motives. […]
  • ocean sun cloudsNew Study Finds 75% Of Rising Ocean Heat Likely Natural, CO2 Not A Factor
    Oct 24, 2025
    Study shows ocean warming driven mostly by natural cycles, not greenhouse gas emissions, challenging mainstream global warming narratives. […]
  • LNG terminal in germanyU.S. And Qatar Push Back On EU’s Climate Mandates That Threaten LNG Exports
    Oct 24, 2025
    U.S. and Qatari officials warn that the EU’s latest climate regulations under CSDDD could endanger Europe’s access to affordable natural gas. […]
  • marines trainingCrazy Hill Op-Ed Demands Generals Respond To Climate Change ‘National Security’ Threat
    Oct 23, 2025
    The Hill warns of climate Armageddon unless U.S. generals join the fight against ‘Mother Nature,’ now deemed a national security threat. […]
  • Shipping port near power plantEurope’s Energy Crisis Shows Net Zero Dogma Comes At A Cost
    Oct 23, 2025
    While China’s rare earth threat exposes U.S. supply chain risks, Europe’s energy crisis shows how net zero policies backfired spectacularly. […]
  • wind farm climate outDemocrats Ditch Climate Messaging As Rising Utility Costs Hit Voters
    Oct 23, 2025
    As Democrats struggle with climate messaging, voters feel the pinch from rising utility bills and the party's costly green energy policies. […]
  • Protest system change not climate changeLead Attorney Admits Real Goal Of Climate Lawsuits: Backdoor Carbon Tax
    Oct 23, 2025
    A top lawyer spearheading climate lawsuits says the quiet part out loud: litigation is a backdoor carbon tax on oil companies and consumers. […]
  • WMO reportHow The World Meteorological Organization Lies To You—Using Your Taxes
    Oct 22, 2025
    The WMO’s 2025 greenhouse gas report hides key data that undercuts the so-called climate 'crisis' narrative—funded by your tax dollars. […]
  • Hurricane generating ocean waves2025 Hurricane Season Is Flopping As Alarmist Predictions Fail
    Oct 22, 2025
    The 2025 hurricane season so far has seen no major U.S. landfalls, exposing alarmists’ failed predictions of catastrophic storms. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Subscribe to receive a digest of daily stories, or get emailed once they're published. Check your Junk/Spam folder for a verification email.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books You May Like

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch

 
Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky
Share via
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky