Science Snippets: WaPo Continues Misleading Its Readership

Draft script:

It should come as no surprise that The Washington Post publishes misleading information. This is the same newspaper that plagiarized and defamed me about a year ago in an article titled Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing ‘climate deniers’.

The Washington Post, famously owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, continues the pattern it established many years ago. In the case I will describe in this video, it’s the same reporter continuing the same pattern of lies. This reporter made the mistake of sending me an email message shortly before the article about me was published on 24 March 2023. I call it a mistake because sending me an email message means that I have their email address. As a result, I have sent this self-proclaimed reporter a link to each of my blog posts during the year that has transpired since they contacted me and subsequently plagiarized and libeled me. As a result, they have continued to use my work without crediting me. In other words, they continue to plagiarize me. Thankfully, this means The Washington Post occasionally includes timely, correct information in an article.

The latest article, the one on which I will focus in this video, was published in The Washington Post on 14 February 2025. It is titled Scientists have a new explanation for the last two years of record heat. It begins with a paragraph describing the horrors of a rapidly warming planet: “For the past few years, scientists have watched, aghast, as global temperatures have surged — with both 2023 and 2024 reaching around 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. In some ways, that record heat was expected: Scientists predicted that El Niño, combined with decreasing air pollution that cools the earth, would cause temperatures to skyrocket.”

I have no doubt the opening paragraph is accurate, even though the so-called scientists ought to know better than to express fear of the future. The process of science is designed to remove our emotions from the process of generating reliable knowledge. Every scientist ought to understand this concept.

Let’s dig beyond fear and into the other information contained in the article. Specifically, let’s briefly analyze each of the two sentences in the opening paragraph. The first sentence: “For the past few years, scientists have watched, aghast, as global temperatures have surged — with both 2023 and 2024 reaching around 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.” As I have indicated to the WaPo reporter many times within the last year, governments of the world joined climate scientist Andrew Glikson in concluding that Earth passed the 2 C Rubicon. Glikson reached this conclusion in his 8 October 2020 book, The Event Horizon. Governments of the world agreed in October 2023, as I have reported frequently in this space.

The second sentence in the opening paragraph: “In some ways, that record heat was expected: Scientists predicted that El Niño, combined with decreasing air pollution that cools the earth, would cause temperatures to skyrocket.” Referring accurately to the El Niño Southern Oscillation is no surprise. However, off-handedly mentioning the aerosol masking effect is breaking the corporate journalist’s code. It reveals what is known as the best-kept secret in climate science.

Another surprise comes in the following, single-sentence paragraph: “But even those factors, scientists say, are not sufficient to explain the world’s recent record heat.” This short paragraph is followed by another: “Earth’s overall energy imbalance — the amount of heat the planet is taking in minus the amount of heat it is releasing — also continues to rise, worrying scientists. The energy imbalance drives global warming. If it rises, scientists expect global temperatures to follow.”

The surprise, at least to me, is openly mentioning not only the aerosol masking effect, but also mentioning energy imbalance. I cannot imagine the reporter understands the physics of climate change, even though it has been described for a few hundred years in the relevant, peer-reviewed literature. Kudos to this reporter for correctly describing the importance of energy imbalance.

The article at The Washington Post refers to a peer-reviewed article in the renowned journal, Science: “researchers analyzed how clouds have changed over the past decade. They found that low-altitude cloud cover has fallen dramatically – which has also reduced the reflectivity of the planet. The year 2023 – which was 1.48 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average – had the lowest albedo since 1940.”

The following paragraph provides an annoying summary: “In short, the Earth is getting darker.” The grammar is annoying, not the idea. It’s Earth, not the Earth. Just as we refer to other planets as Mars, Venus, and so on, we correctly refer to this planet as Earth. It’s Earth, not the Earth, just as it’s Mars, Venus, New York City, and San Francisco. We don’t call Seattle the Seattle, just as we don’t call Bill The Bill.

Near the end of the article in The Washington Post, we are informed that a feedback loop could be forming. The article makes it seem as if this would be the first self-reinforcing feedback loop affecting Earth’s climate system.

What could drive the creation of this self-reinforcing feedback loop? Declining cloud cover is mentioned as a possibility, with mention of a preprint in the peer-reviewed journal, Science.

The final two paragraphs of the article in The Washington Post provide a compelling, albeit disappointing, summary of the information presented in WaPo and the peer-reviewed paper: “If the cloud changes are part of a feedback loop, scientists warn, that could indicate more warming coming down the pipe, with extreme heat for billions of people around the globe. Every hot year buttresses the idea that some researchers have now embraced, that global temperature rise will reach the high end of what models had predicted. If so, the planet could pass 1.5 degrees Celsius later this decade.

Researchers now say that they are rushing to understand these effects as the planet continues to warm.”

The lead author of the peer-reviewed paper in Science wraps the article in The Washington Post: “We are kind of in crunch time. We have a really strong climate signal — and from year to year it’s getting stronger.”

This, of course, is to be expected. As we have known for several years, Earth is amid abrupt, irreversible climate change.