WaPo's 'baked in goodness' of climatic hyper-adjectives

It has been obvious for years that there’s a “say anything” aspect to climate and weather reporting that has gotten out of hand. Today I saw a prime example of this sort of hyperbolic exaggeration in action via Twitter.  The Washington Post Capital Weather Gang often does some very good reports on weather, but sometimes when they stray into the realm of climate and records, they get just a little too excited.

For example:

Source here. Here is the article they Tweeted about, saying:

This winter’s shocking warmth in the Arctic, some seven degrees above average, has oozed into the Alaska which is experiencing one of its mildest recorded winters.

So far this winter, Alaska’s temperature has averaged about 10 degrees above normal, ranking third warmest in records that date back to 1925.

…

And, for the first time on record, not a single observing location in Alaska has recorded a temperature of minus-50 or colder.

No -50F readings so far? And this is a bad thing?

They don’t seem too pleased about being corrected on that baked and roasted terminology:

For reference, Common oven temperatures (such as terms: cool oven, very slow oven, slow oven, moderate oven, hot oven, fast oven, etc.) are set to control the effects of baking in an oven, for various lengths of time:

And the reality of actual temperatures right now in Alaska is:

This sort of exaggeration is what happens when you think only in terms of anomaly temperatures that are branded hot reds in the map above – you lose sight of the real temperatures.

In the current temperature map, we see a number of 30’s and 40’s in southeast Alaska, but not a one that could be called a “baked” or “roasted” temperature equivalent. Given the normals seen below in the following tables, I don’t see these temperatures as meriting the level of alarm that WaPo assigned to them.

Average Temperatures for Alaska in February