Headline

As December Heat Ends History’s Warmest Year, Media Still Shy Away From the Cause

 United States

As wave after wave of record-breaking high temperatures grips huge swaths of America, media coverage of the December warmth has rarely been willing to discuss its cause.

The Guardian published a photo of cherry trees blooming in December in Washington, DC–but don’t think this has anything to do with global warming, the paper said. (photo: Bao Dandan/Xinhua Press/Corbis)

As wave after wave of record-breaking high temperatures grips huge swaths of America, media coverage of the December warmth has rarely been willing to discuss its cause. Reporters may be willing to point to a monster El Niño, but hardly have mentioned it’s launching its assault off a higher baseline temperatures from human-caused climate change, resulting in some jaw-dropping record highs...While this year’s El Niño is part of a natural cycle that’s regularly sent US temperatures soaring, it’s now coming off a launching pad that’s been raised by global warming. “Once you superimpose this natural [El Niño] cycle on greenhouse warming,” Kim Cobb of the Georgia Institute of Technology Cobb told Climate Central (1/3/13), “things just get worse.”