During the Eastern heatwave in early July, I stumbled across an article on CNN entitled, “This heat wave would be ‘virtually impossible’ if not for fossil fuel pollution, study says.” (If you click on that, you’ll be redirected to a different article. I’ll tell you why in a moment.)
The use of the term ‘virtually impossible’ together with the characterization of greenhouse gases as ‘pollution’ told me everything I needed to expect from the article. But even though the article was poised to become a dumpster fire, my curiosity meant I just had to see the rationale for asserting that the heat wave would not have happened had it not been for fossil fuels.
So, let’s see what the "study" said.
The article asserts that “the heat wave was triggered by the strong heat dome parked over the Northeast—a stagnant area of high pressure that traps and enhances hot, humid air.”
Well, let’s get something straight. The ‘stagnant area of high pressure’ is redundant—high pressure is associated with widely spaced isobars and lighter winds because of physics. It does not ‘trap and enhance hot, humid air,’ as this system originated over the tropical ocean and thus was created with air that was already hot and humid. Had it originated over the northern Canada ice fields, it would have been cold and dry. This is the difference between maritime tropical air masses and continental polar air masses, both of which are high-pressure systems.
Nothing new here, nothing that needs greenhouse gases to explain it. I know, I know, I am being picky with their wording. But it is important to get the meteorology correct.
However, the next sentence is the attention-grabber: “But the intensity of the heat and humidity combined this week would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without the effects of fossil fuel pollution.”
To figure out where the proof for the ‘virtually impossible’ claim originates, you must do a bit of sleuthing. CNN simply concludes with “the finding was published early Friday from World Weather Attribution, a scientific network which analyzes the role of climate change in driving extreme weather events.”
So, what is “World Weather Attribution”? It is a European group of scientists that pioneered “rapid attribution science”—that is, getting into the media the narrative that any developing weather event is caused or exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. The group analyzes hundreds of global events each year, including heatwaves, floods, and droughts. Unsurprisingly, their ‘findings’ consistently name climate change as making these extreme events more frequent, more intense, or both. As a result, their analyses are highly cited by media outlets and widely used in policy discussions, but they don’t hold up well under careful scientific scrutiny, as one might expect from the absence of any empirically observed increase in the frequency or intensity of any extreme weather events during the period of allegedly greenhouse gas-driven warming (variously defined as roughly the last 60 to 180 years)—see this and this.
If you go to their website, they use the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature as their index of heat. The Wet Bulb Globe Temperature is believed to be much better than the Heat Index, and it is calculated by taking the wet bulb temperature—a measure of humidity—and multiplying by 0.7, adding to it the air temperature multiplied by 0.1, and then adding the black globe temperature multiplied by 0.2. The globe temperature measures radiant heat from the sun using a black globe thermometer. Thus, the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature is largely a measure of humidity and air temperature, as the wet bulb temperature also is highly dependent on the air temperature. However, it requires the use of a black globe thermometer, which is not often available.
Nevertheless, the folks at the World Weather Attribution claim that the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature “reached the highest observed values on record across the study region.” They then assert that the planet has warmed by one-point-four-degrees-Celsius due to the burning of fossil fuels and thus, “in a one-point-four-degrees-Celsius cooler climate, Wet Bulb Globe Temperatures as high as those forecast in early July 2026 would have been so extreme as to be virtually impossible.”
Apparently, that ‘proves’ that this heat wave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ had it not been for the warming they assert comes from recent greenhouse gas emissions. I guess this is how you get things out very quickly.
But something funny happened on the way to making this blog post. I returned to the CNN webpage that I had visited earlier, and I was immediately redirected to a new webpage. This one was entitled “‘Extremely high’ rates of heat-related ER visits, CDC says, with more coming Saturday.” The only reference to fossil fuels was the final paragraph, labelled “Pollution-fueled Heat Wave,” which read, “the intensity of the heat and humidity combined this week would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without the effects of fossil fuel pollution, according to an analysis from World Weather Attribution.”
Fortunately, I had saved the original webpage so I could reread it—the original webpage appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet.
I found this to be odd. What happened to the original article, and why am I redirected to another webpage written days later that only relegates the “virtually impossible” claim to a footnote paragraph at the end of the article?
I decided to use Google to search for the original webpage and found several local television stations that had referenced it. But Google identified another webpage that had been published four days earlier than the one I sought. It was entitled, “Europe’s record-shattering heat wave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ just a few decades ago. Here’s why.”
Funny, this article sounded very similar to the one on the heat wave in the United States—except that European references replaced those in the United States, as one would expect.
So next, I examined the authors. The European edition was written by Laura Paddison, who is CNN’s senior climate writer based in London. The United States version, which has since disappeared, was written by meteorologists Briana Waxman and Mary Gilbert with science journalist Kate S. Petersen reporting. Briana Waxman is a Senior Weather Editor on CNN’s weather and climate team, and both Waxman and Gilbert cover extreme weather and its intersection with the climate crisis. Kate S. Petersen has special training and interest in covering climate change, climate solutions, and the renewable energy transition.
So, what happened to these people, their article, and where was Laura Paddison, who wrote the original article?
Maybe someone with more experience in journalism can explain what happened, but it looks to me like the United States trio repurposed the European heatwave article from Ms. Paddison, and an editor at CNN decided to pull their article. The Internet tells me this is called a ‘clip job,’ or a ‘rehashed article.’ However, I prefer the often-used, more direct term: ‘paraphrasing plagiarism.’
But returning to the original claim, it seems like a stretch to assert that this heat wave is ‘virtually impossible’ in a world not warmed by fossil fuels. Simply assuming that all the warming since the Industrial Revolution is attributed to fossil fuels and then subtracting that temperature rise from the Wet Bulb Global Temperature calculation is scientific malpractice.
But then again, I told you in the introduction that I knew what I was getting into ….
David R. Legates, Ph.D., retired Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware, is Director of Research and Education at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and co-author of the Amazon best-seller Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.