The collective brain of The New York Times suffered a system failure and forgot that it gets hot during summertime.
Times climate reporter Raymond Zhong published an asinine piece of eco-activist agitprop with a headline that epitomized the definition of begging the question:
“Without Climate Change, U.S. Heat Wave Called ‘Virtually Impossible.’”
And like clockwork, Zhong predictably skewered humanity for causing the summer heatwave: “Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been ‘virtually impossible’ in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday.”
Zhong relied on the scareporn put out by World Weather Attribution, a notorious climate activist organization that aims to quantify humanity’s impact on weather-related events, according to Influence Watch. One of its core funders is none other than Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who’s infamous for the billions he’s pumped into furthering his longstanding obsession with climate politics. If that wasn’t bad enough, WWA has been called out for circumventing regular peer-review processes in exchange for “rapid attribution studies.” In fact, by WWA’s own admission, only “about a quarter of WWA studies” are published in peer-reviewed journals.
Spain’s Science Media Centre examined WWA’s methodology in 2023, and determined then that its “rapid attribution” model “can't tell us whether global warming ‘caused’ a particular event.” This is all pretty damning context that undermines the integrity of this newspaper reporting. Did Zhong bother pointing any of this out? Nope!
Zhong instead just haphazardly regurgitated WWA’s so-called findings that while the highest 5-day wet globe temperature average in Northeastern US and Eastern Canada was still rare, “it would have been so rare as to be effectively impossible in the cooler world before the Industrial Revolution, they found.” Imperial College London climate scientist Theodore Keeping — one of the WWA study’s co-authors — reportedly snorted to Zhong that the “climate the [U.S] has today is fundamentally different to the one it had when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.”
Oy vey, where do we begin? JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy blasted Zhong’s nonsense in a July 3 X post, dubbing it “OMG stupid.” Milloy argued that the year 1776 — right around the time the Industrial Revolution was in full swing — occurred “amid a period known as the naturally-caused Little Ice Age. The end of the LIA (mid 19th century) had nothing to do with emissions and today's climate has nothing discernible to do with emissions.”
OMG stupid from the NYTimes: "The climate the country has today is fundamentally different to the one it had when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence."
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) July 3, 2026
1776, of course, occurred amid a period known as the naturally-caused Little Ice Age. The end of the… pic.twitter.com/1YapRhvKW3
In fact, most of the hottest temperatures on record in the Northeast U.S. were documented during or around the early 20th century, as displayed by a chart shared July 5 by meteorologist Chris Martz. New York’s highest record temperature, for example, was marked in 1926 when heat reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit. In Pennsylvania, 1936 still holds the top spot for hottest temperature on record at a blistering 111 degrees Fahrenheit.
“100° temperatures are now a reality in all 50 U.S. states.”
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) July 5, 2026
They have been a reality for well over a century. Alaska’s record of 100°F was set in June 1915.
But you forgot to mention that.
I wonder why? https://t.co/1YkB9L3uS2 pic.twitter.com/R50Gl5MreT
Apparently, using Zhong and WWA’s logic, whatever archaic technology industrialists used in the comparatively fledgling U.S. economy during the late 19th to early 20th centuries had more of an impact on today’s climate than the massive energy-consuming, technology-heavy era Americans live in now.
What a joke.
