Essay by Eric Worrall
Of course they still find space to blame President Trump withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.
It’s a record 48.9°C summer. The media doesn’t care, and there’s a few reasons why
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JEFF SPARROW
FEB 2, 2026Parts of Australia recorded their highest temperature of all time this month, while across the world, the crucial 1.5°C warming limit is sliding increasingly out of reach. But much of the media no longer cares.
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In January 2021, it [media climate mentions] dropped back, with 2,050 references. It then continued to slowly decline: 1,779 in January 2022, 1,913 in 2023, 1,629 in 2024, and 1,600 in 2025. …
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But then came the COVID-19 pandemic …
The genocide in Gaza …
That’s surely the context for the media’s declining attention to climate. This week, the US finished its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement … political and media insiders feel less pressure than ever to discuss climate: a topic increasingly off the global agenda.
Back in the day, many scientists thought the reality of a warming planet would be enough to force a response. That’s clearly not the case. Without a renewed movement for climate action, the temperature records will continue to fall –and nothing whatsoever will follow.
Jeff Sparrow
ContributorHe is a former columnist for Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at radio station 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. His books include Provocations: New and Selected Writing, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right, No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson and several others titles.
Read more: https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/02/02/climate-change-heatwave-summer-media-coverage-global-warming/
As usual greens are blaming everyone and everything but themselves.
The real reason the green agenda is collapsing is nothing bad has happened. Hitting 1.5C without any climate disasters caused a critical loss of credibility for the green movement. Their pathetic flailing about claiming the climate disaster is here, trying to redefine Australia’s beach weather Summer as a climate catastrophe, or talk up the January US snow storm, its like a comedy horror story reveal where the terrifying monster turns out to be a mouse.
With fresh memories of the lies and the exaggerations of the Covid lockdown, the exposure of the fake climate crisis, the exposure of 1.5C as being just an arbitrary number pulled out of someone’s proverbial, came at just the wrong time for greens. People are fed up with being frightened and misled by activists in lab coats.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
They will never admit to being wrong so emotional outbursts are all they can manage in the face of empirical reality.
“The genocide in Gaza …”
That’s where I stopped reading.
That’s when I knew where the author was coming from.
His other writings confirm he is a hard-core, clueless Lefty.
As usual the “hottest evah” hyperventilation relies on the BoM having adjusted/homogenised away many of the Tmax records of the past.
Yes, there is a lot of that going on all over the world.
If it wasn’t for temperature data mannipulation, the Climate Alarmists would have nothing to talk about.
The picture says it all: the media is whipping a dead horse, and the public has been consistently ignoring the alarmists regardless of how strident their calls for climate action have become. The climate crisis circus is as good as over, so its time for the performers to fold up their tents and go home permanently.
Yes, and what will be the next prophecy of doom that they will champion? Activists must always be active.
Or doomsters must always proclaim doom. The old time “The End Is Nigh” sandwich board guy has a lot of company now, which only encourages the nonsense. Mental health has taken a heavy hit.
AI doomsday will be the next cause I think. AI doom potentially has far broader appeal than climate doom, because it has the potential to reach Christians (arrogant greedy tech billionaires trying to replace God with an AI), libertarians (AI subverting freedom by creating irresistible authority, intrusive AI surveillance destroying privacy, and helping authoritarians exploit our weaknesses), climate activists (AI sucks so much electricity and resources), unions (AI is going to take all our jobs), concerned parents (AI is messing up our kids), and conservatives (AI is upending society).
Anything that ends the climate nonsense is OK with me.
Remove all of your data from the “Cloud.”
The next solar generated cool period (Solar Minima) is almost upon us, predicted over the next 3-15 years, but not by global models or the IPCC orthodoxy. Let them get worked up over that like they did for the similar 1955-75 global cooling period, that has also never been adequately explained by the UN climate alarmists!
Do we really care what these environmental catastrophic nutters postulate given their 100% failure in predictions over the past 60 years.
I was just a kid (that’s a lot of decades ago) when first introduced to :The Boy that Cried “Wolf!” Guess most of the Greenie Weenies missed out on the lesson. About a half century of ice age then boiling age alarms with absolutely none of the catastrophes coming to pass has tended to overcome even the most rabid harbinger of doom – since most of them have lost all but the most ignorant subscribers to their annual (monthly? weekly?) cyclical of disaster.
Here on the South Coast of England we go through annual temperature change on minus 3C in winter to plus 35C in summer , so I really don’t think 2or 3C increase gradually is going to make any difference to us . Many Brits travel even in summer to Spain or Canary Islands just to get the extra heat in summer . Southern Spain is about two hours from South Coast by Plane , Canary Islands are about 4 Hrs away by plane but you still get 20C regularly in mid winter . For any would be American visitors to the Canaries or Spain they are fairly safe countries with little violent crime , low gun ownership and nice bars and restaurants.
Chicken Little, too. “The sky is falling!”
“The Little Red Hen”
It doesn’t deal with false warnings but it does deal with those not willing to work or do produce anything useful being more than willing to benefit from the work of others.
Just like the Green Grifters.
“Back in the day, many scientists thought the reality of a warming planet would be a good thing
enough to force a response. That’s clearly not the case with many scientists today. But with OR without a renewed movement for climate action, the temperature records will continue to fall –and nothing whatsoever will follow.”There. No worries.
Very nice Eric.
Thanks Bob 🙂
Much of the activism in the world today receives Marxist support. They use chaos to their advantage except in Communist countries where it’s forbidden. The Russian revolution never ended.
That supposed ‘record of all time’ was recorded at a weather station at Walpeup in the Victorian Mallee district on January 27, but ‘all time’ for Walpeup goes back to only 1965.
The township of Mildura about 100 km away recorded its highest ‘of all time’ of 50.7C on January 7 in 1906 when the CO2 concentration was around 290 ppm.
Ah, but the BoM declared that all official temperatures prior to 1910 were “unreliable”, so 50.7 C in 1906 doesn’t count.
It’s all pretty pointless, anyway. No official BoM instrument actually measures air temperature. Sorry about that, but it’s true.
Maybe the proposed billion dollar computer can generate modelled temperatures, and avoid the thermometer problem altogether. Oh dear, I’ll be accused of being a denier, won’t I?
That may be the policy for aggregated temperature trends but not necessarily for individual station data.
The BoM page with records for Mildura PO states: “Missing observations associated with the observer being unavailable (where observations are undertaken manually), a failure in the observing equipment, or when an event has produced suspect data may result in an extreme event not being recorded.”
50.7C on January 7 1906 is recorded so presumably is regarded as reliable.
“the crucial 1.5°C warming limit”
Pretend there’s a snarky comment about “does that mean they’ll shut it now?” here.
““the crucial 1.5°C warming limit””
A meaningless, non-science bogus number that was only met at the very tip of a strong El Nino event in surface data which is massively affected by urban-warming, bad sites, agenda driven homogenisation and data maladjustments..
Maybe the planet reached somewhere similar to the 1930,40s.
Most likely not even near the warmth of the MWP and the previous 8000 or so years.
1.5°C an established goal by politicians.
What really really irked them was a couple of comics in papers about if only we had gone net-zero it would be so much cooler today. Not only aren’t they taking it seriously they are laughing at the situation.
Endless FakeNews…..😳😁👌
As long as time moves forward, records will continue to fall in all facets of life.
Shouldn’t the worry be more about atmospheric heat content than temperature, anyway? Just wondering…
You need to understand. Temperature is climate and climate is temperature and neither have anything to do with energy.
Now, back to reality.
Come to Melbourne to live.
Our maximum temperature has been falling since 2009.
The 2024 global “hottest year Evah!” was not a record here, it was pretty average.
Our heatwaves are not getting hotter.
Alarmists who know this fail to explain it.
Maybe that is because they cannot bear to look at the raw data.
Geoff S
You are doing important work, Geoff.
So are you, Tom.
I cannot understand the inability of too many commenters to accept what measurements are showing. The expensive BOM fabrication named ACORN-SAT is unjustified alteration of data by subjective guesswork that has no place in proper science. Geoff S
“I cannot understand the inability of too many commenters to accept what measurements are showing.”
I can’t, either!
It is right in front of their eyes, but they reject it.
I think this if called “denying reality”.
“Back in the day, many scientists thought the reality of a warming planet would be enough to force a response.”
We have responded–Yawn…
And “they” changed the problem from global warming to climate change, just to hedge the bets.
Greening Australia with the usual-
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