Suzanne Downing: Media is at it again, heating up the climate change narrative

By SUZANNE DOWNING

July 6, 2026 – It is summer. It gets warm, even hot in places that are not in Alaska.

And just like clockwork, the New York Times has a familiar summertime ritual. Temperatures rise, thermometers make a few records, and The Old Gray Lady paper dusts off its climate playbook, explaining that the latest heat wave bears the unmistakable fingerprints of human-caused climate change.

This year’s version is no different.

As much of the Lower 48 bakes under a July heat dome, the Times once again presents extreme heat as compelling evidence of a dangerously warming planet. The reporting relies on attribution science that has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, with researchers able to estimate how much more likely or more intense certain heat events have become because of greenhouse gas emissions. Sometimes they are right.

The Earth’s average temperature has risen over the past century. Heat waves have become more frequent and more intense in many regions. Record high temperatures now outnumber record lows by a substantial margin. Those are established findings.

But a century is not very long for Earth, editorial certainty notwithstanding.

When the weather is hot, headlines confidently declare that climate change is the cause.

When the weather turns bitterly cold, however, the coverage suddenly becomes much more tentative or just slips into a dark corner.

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Instead of certainty, readers get phrases about cold weather such as “some scientists believe,” “could be linked,” or “not all researchers agree.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with acknowledging uncertainty where uncertainty exists.

The problem is that readers come away with the impression that every heat wave proves climate change while every cold snap is merely weather, when reality is more complicated.

This past winter, Alaska experienced one of its coldest seasons in decades. Fairbanks recorded its coldest meteorological winter since records began in 1904, enduring weeks of temperatures at or below minus 40 degrees. Anchorage also experienced an unusually cold and snowy winter by recent standards. Even this week, it’s been unseasonably cold out in the Aleutians.

Locally, it’s weather news. Nationally? Crickets.

The same newspapers that devote extensive coverage to every summer heat wave largely treated Alaska’s and the Yukon Territory’s extraordinary cold as a regional curiosity.

Part of that is because Alaska and the Yukon have relatively few residents compared with the major metropolitan areas now experiencing dangerous heat. It doesn’t fit the narrative and no one cares if there are few humans in the area. Population factors into news coverage.

Extreme heat fits neatly into the broader climate storyline. Extreme cold does not.

Ironically, climate reporting overall actually declined last year. Analyses of international media coverage found climate stories fell sharply from previous years as politics, wars, and economic news crowded them out. The war in Iran made climate change disappear.

The public deserves accurate reporting on climate science, not falling to the temptation to present every weather event as a morality play, even if some scientists push that narrative.

Weather is something we all love to talk about and that’s why Marxists have latched onto it as the new narrative for destroying progress.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaska who remembers winters from the last century.