TIME claims in a recent article, “The Planet is Heating Faster Than Ever Before,” that global warming has dramatically accelerated since 2015. This is demonstrably false. Observational satellite data disagree with that claim, showing short-term variability driven by natural, short-lived, events, with current temperatures now below the 2015–2016 El Niño peak. In addition, proxy data from the past also show many periods over which temperatures shifted much more rapidly and steeply, both upwards and downwards, than during the recent period of modest warming.
The TIME article cites research which claims warming has nearly doubled in pace since 2015, representing a sharp acceleration and warning the world could cross 1.5°C of warming within a few years. The claim rests on statistical adjustments that “filter out” natural variability such as El Niño and volcanic effects. That filtering is central to the narrative. The acceleration appears after removing natural influences from the temperature record, that are clearly displayed in the raw data.
When we examine the observational satellite record itself, seen below, the story looks very different.
The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) Version 6.1 global lower troposphere dataset shows a long-term warming trend of +0.16°C per decade from January 1979 through February 2026. That trend has remained essentially stable for years. There is no visible post-2015 inflection point in the long-term slope.
The chart shows the strong 2015–2016 El Niño spike rising above +0.7°C relative to the 1991–2020 mean. After that peak, temperatures declined. The most recent value — +0.39°C in February 2026 — remains well below that earlier El Niño high-water mark in 2016.
If warming had truly “doubled” in rate beginning in 2015, today’s anomalies should sit well above the 2016 peak. They do not.
It is also important to understand what caused some of the more recent spikes in the record. The unusually warm values in 2024 stand out in the UAH time series. But those occurred in the wake of the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption, which injected an unprecedented amount of water vapor into the stratosphere. That injection temporarily enhanced radiative forcing, aka the greenhouse effect, because water vapor is in fact the strongest greenhouse gas. It was a short-term perturbation — not evidence of a structural acceleration in the underlying greenhouse-driven trend.
The UAH report itself describes 2024 as “anomalously warm,” and the data show a return toward the longer-term trend through 2025 and into early 2026. That behavior — spike and partial retreat — is characteristic of natural variability superimposed on gradual warming.
TIME’s framing depends heavily on adjusted surface datasets where natural influences are mathematically removed. But climate is a long-term average of what actually happens in the real world, including El Niño events, volcanic eruptions, and short-term atmospheric changes. Removing those factors to produce a smoothed “underlying” curve does not demonstrate that the observable climate system has entered a new accelerated regime, though it does conveniently serve to advance the anthropogenic global warming narrative.
The long-term satellite trend remains modest and steady at +0.16°C per decade. That is not a doubling. It is not a sharp upward trend; it is a continuation of a decades-long gradual increase punctuated by temporary spikes and dips.
Climate change is measured over decades, not from one El Niño peak to the next. When the full satellite record is considered — including the 2016 peak, the 2024 anomaly, and the current February 2026 value — the claim that the planet is heating “faster than ever before” since 2015 is not supported by the observational data.
Nor is it supported by paleo-climate proxy data which shows much more significant temperature shifts over short time periods multiple times throughout history, long before humans began emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The first take away from this article is that Time needs some basic fact checkers with an understanding of the English language. Data clearly demonstrates that the present warming is not “faster than ever before,” and certainly not larger. The UAH record shows gradual warming with natural variability layered on top. It does not show runaway acceleration. If Time had bothered to look at actual data rather than uncritically regurgitating a press release, perhaps, if they were honest, its would have published a significantly different story – one with a far less alarming and patently inaccurate headline.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
TIME needs fact checkers? Remember, most of them are lefties who only reinforce and double- down on whatever lie advances their agenda. Case in point, “extreme weather events are increasing” – even though the data shows they are not, the lie once told continues to be told over and over – Goebbels would be proud. Ordinary people who don’t really pay attention now believe it unquestioningly.
The lie is always the first tool in their toolbox that they reach for – because lies work so often.
The headline of a newspaper article by our favorite climate panic author, Seth Borenstein, boldly announces that the recent “wild weather swings” are a “new normal.” I am glad he realizes that this is “normal” and climate change is not mentioned in the article. However, I am not sure this was his intent!
Repost of my comment from the fool expert blog:
>>the “experts” are still out there making fools of themselves as if nothing has gone wrong.
I frequently read posts at Realclimate.com where supposedly the best of the best climate scientists discuss their work.
This week Foster and Rahmstorf presented a recent article of theirs supposedly showing accelerated global warming.
There are a few easy to spot problems (I didn’t bother to read their publication – life is too short for that kind of nonsense)
– they remove “effects of ENSO, volcanoes and changes in solar forcing” and seemingly end up with a data series with less noise than the original data, which is a mathematical impossiblity (this step is obviously lacking a rigorous error handling as the trends they are removing have uncertainties themselves, which at least in the RC article are completely ignored) Their cleaned up result looks nothing like the original data, while there are countless valid alternatives to the choices made in this data processing step
– the data range is short, my cherry picking sensor is going wild.
The real problem here seems to be that if a non-expert can see holes as big as those in the reasoning, how can an editor and expert reviewers pass such nonsense?
Simmone Shah, a millenial or Gen Z reporter knows no different. She has been fed this junk since a child. But, hey, don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
So ‘filter out’ the facts and you have your proof?
Indeed, the rate of warming over the 35 year period 1910 — 1945 when human CO2 emissions were relatively insignificant is almost identical to the warming post-1980, after the 35 year period of net temperature stasis 1945 — 1980.
There is no correlation between the rate of increase in human emissions and the rate of global warming and to simple-mindedly credit all the post-1950 net-warming to human CO2 emissions is not borne out by the data.
As Hubert Lamb noted in his ‘Climate History and the Modern World’,first published in 1982
In Spitsbergen (Svalbaard) the open season for shipping at the coal port lengthened from three months of the year before 1920 to over seven months of the year by the late 1930s.
Anthony, I think you are mistaken about Hunga Tonga. There is really no case for it at all.
This idea lacked proper analysis at the time it was introduced a few years ago but now we can see in hindsight it wasn’t so important climatically. The null hypothesis is the HT-HH eruption had no effect, and so far the only evidence is weak and circumstantial to the ocean and UAH warming spikes.
The HT-HH eruption and WV did not cause the UAH warming spike, as UAH LT followed SST as usual.
A short investigation leads to the truth that the HT water vapor injection was a relatively small amount compared to tropospheric water vapor, and there is no mechanism for it to warm the ocean.
The lower 2022 water vapor anomaly after the La Niña was followed by the El Niño WV spike, which was only a little larger than the 2016 peak. The large 2023/24 water vapor increase was thousands of times more water vapor than HT WV.
The ocean heat content rise for the HT-HH area after the eruption was also comparatively small.
I think you are correct that the tropospheric water content was not affected much by that eruption, but the stratospheric water content was and is.
And there is good evidence that it still affects the climate and likely also the surface temperature anomaly.
For example most experts seem to agree that the recent Arctic polar vortex anomaly is caused by this excess water.
End of 2025 J Vinos posted this article containing among other points a list of measured effects correlating with this event and can be reasonable be attributed to stratospheric excess water:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/30/the-2023-climate-event-revealed-the-greatest-failure-of-climate-science/
So color me unconvinced that the climate alarmists did due diligence, when they rushed to dismiss the Hunga-Tonga as a cause for warming.
This just one more example of uncertainty neglected by the Foster and Rahmstorf article Anthony is discussing here ..
The only people who didn’t do due diligence first are all the promoters of this idea, starting with Javier Vinos. The people who rushed to judgment were all the people hyping Hunga Tonga first.
I won’t be re-reading his article. If you know the subject so well you should list his points. I already commented on that post here and at Dr. Curry’s site.
By the time he posted that article I had already presented my science of the 2023 warming spike the year before at the 2024 AGU meeting. I had already predicted the likely event of the warming spike back in 2022 at the NASA LASP sun-climate symposium, due to relative tropical cloudlessness and the solar cycle. Imagine my surprise to see this spurious HT correlation promoted with scant circumstantial evidence as fact here and elsewhere ever since.
“…most experts seem to agree that the recent Arctic polar vortex anomaly is caused by this excess water.”
The polar vortex anomaly is a cooling event south of the Arctic, not a warming cause. There are other causes of polar vortex anomalies that aren’t related to water vapor.
Remember, Vinos’ original (and wrong) claim was the attribution of the 2023/24 warming spike to HT-HH. As I point out, there is no connection, there is no mechanism linking it to surface warming, ie ocean warming. His claims were just suppositions.
Vinos invented this idea because he could think of no other likely cause of the warming. Vinos et al has done little to support his idea except make more of the same assertions. It was Vinos who had the greatest failure in climate science.
As there was no climate or ocean warming effect from HT-HH water vapor to begin with, there is no cooling effect from it now from the water vapor decline.
Like I already wrote, I am unconvinced. You seemingly mixing up topics does not help.
That cooling you write about here would not happen to be a stratospheric cooling, alarmists call an antropogenic fingerprint, caused by the roughly 10% change of the stratospheric water content still present in the stratosphere?
>>””Remember, Vinos’ original (and wrong) claim was the attribution of the 2023/24 warming spike to HT-HH. As I point out, there is no connection, there is no mechanism linking it to surface warming””
That you know of.
Like I wrote he has a whole list of atmospheric anomalies showing up in the wave of that eruption. You certainly seem to be showing a religious element here typical for alarmists.
For a US temperature check I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/countries/united-states/average-temperature-by-year.
The Tmax and Tmin temperature from 1901 to 2024 is displayed in long table. Here is the temperature data these two dates:
Year——-Tmax——-Tmin——-Tave Temperatures are ° C
2024——-16.8———4.3———10.5
1901——-14.9———1.6———-8.2
Change—+1.9——-+2.7——-+2.3
After 123 years the US has warmed by 2.3 ° C. Although Tave has exceeded the 2015 Paris Agreement of 1.5°C by 0.8° C, I don’t recall any recent reports of climate catastrophes occurring in the US. A slight warming of few degrees is of little consequence because in many region of the earth there will always be long cold and snowy winters like in Canada where I live. Moreover the availability of fresh water is more important than any concerns and obsessions about temperature.
At the above URL, there is a selector for acquiring temperature and climate data from any country in NOAA’s database.
Simmone Shah has reported on: the “TIME100 Climate Leadership Forum”, whatever that is/was.
I stopped reading Time, except at the dentist office, about 20 years ago.
Why In the world are you still promoting the GHG theory? I have a greenhouse and know a thing or two about them. Although I initially accepted the theory uncritically — back when I still thought Greenpeace was a respectable science-oriented organization, I finally realized that it made no sense to believe that a disbursed trace gas (or vapor) could act like a film such as a greenhouse covering. That this notion is still accepted as factual by those aware that the “climate crisis” is a hoax is a testament to the lasting power of well-constructed false propaganda.
Re: the vernacular use of GH ….it’s NOT cuz the trace gases are a “film” (water not so “trace” at about 3% at 30C saturated)….its cuz they help keep plants warmer down where the dirt is….compared to the cold air higher up….and as such is one of the best descriptive acronyms for a complex phenomenon in any technical field.
Additionally, the annual September low in Arctic sea ice reached a minimum in 2012, and has been larger (colder) every year since 2012. In 2025 it was back into the range of -2-sigma for the 1981-2021 September average. I guess the sea ice didn’t get the memo that the Arctic was supposed to be getting warmer.
But it’s fairly low for the decade right now…
“Additionally, the annual September low in Arctic sea ice reached a minimum in 2012, and has been larger (colder) every year since 2012”.
Yes this is true but only tells part of the story. In fact since 2012, which was anomalous, the Arctic sea ice minimum in September, has continued on a very slow decline. Moreover, the 2012 maximum was higher than any maximum since. Rather than focusing specifically on the minimum, why not focus instead on the annual mean, taken as a whole. That way, we get a much more accurate picture of what’s going on with Arctic sea ice.
Sorry to have to be the one who bursts the bubble that pretends that everything in the garden is rosy (not that I contend that rising CO2 is necessarily a bad thing ) the data currently doesn’t support that notion – not in terms of the satellite data and not in terms of Arctic sea ice.
Having stated all of that, it’s still a very short record in terms of Earth’s history, so quite possibly a temporary warming. Only time will tell. Too many variables in my view to be sure of anything!
from John Daly’s blog.
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
Also:
Historical Aspects of the Northern Canadian Treeline, by Harvey Nichols
https://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic29-1-38.pdf
This appears to be from about 1976/77 – – I don’t see a date.
It’s called spring!
Simmone Shah CV watch: BA English Language and Literature, Barnard College.
It remains to be seen if the satellite record keeps on showing a declining trend line, to bring it back down to pre-2024 levels. Currently Anthony’s article recognises that the record has only dropped as far as the peaks of previous El Ninõs. So, currently, the record is running much higher than the average and has definitely accelerated in the last decade or so. That’s simply the truth.
If temperatures continue to fall to the point where the record does indeed show temperatures back to 2024 levels and without another sudden “anomalous” rise, then, and only then can skeptics claim that there hasn’t been a pretty noticeable acceleration within the last decade.
As ever, I don’t necessarily agree that this is driven by CO2 emissions but as long as the satellite record continues to rise and accelerate with ever higher spikes, we can be sure that the AGW theory won’t go away anytime soon.
The UAH satellite plots do not include the arctic and antarctic.
…And who exactly lives there?
We already know the warming was due to solar energy. Willis demonstrated that over a year ago with his greenhouse efficiency calculations. Unless you’ve got some science where CO2 drives cloud changes directly, the warming had to be natural.
“Unless you’ve got some science where CO2 drives cloud changes directly, the warming …”
Here you go …..
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1412190111
”The greenhouse effect is well-established. Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, reduce the amount of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to space; thus, energy accumulates in the climate system, and the planet warms. However, climate models forced with CO2 reveal that global energy accumulation is, instead, primarily caused by an increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). This study resolves this apparent paradox. The solution is in the climate feedbacks that increase ASR with warming—the moistening of the atmosphere and the reduction of snow and sea ice cover. Observations and model simulations suggest that even though global warming is set into motion by greenhouse gases that reduce OLR, it is ultimately sustained by the climate feedbacks that enhance ASR.”
Here is an earlier paper (2009) that gives the science ….
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL037527
”….. Instead the main warming from an energy budget standpoint comes from increases in absorbed solar radiation that stem directly from the decreasing cloud amounts. These findings underscore the need to ascertain the credibility of the model changes, especially insofar as changes in clouds are concerned.”
How many Time reporters took a science course after high school?
Somewhere between zero and none.
Another factor that comes into play is what is known as a “shock” in a time series. During my investigations into time series I came across this problem of modeling especially using moving averages. A shock means an unexpected disturbance that enters the system through the error term and then propagates forward according to the model’s structure. Depending on the length of the moving average, a shock can have a long decay time and modify the overall trend. A worse outcome in a trend is if the shock reappears before the last one has dissipated.
Without proper treatment, a non-stationary (random walk) time series, the shock may never decay and it becomes a permanent level shift. According to a CoPilot analysis UAH’s diurnal drift correction tends to imprint ENSO variability into the long‑term baseline more strongly than RSS.
Some here have recognized ENSO’s effects on UAH, noticeably bnice2000 has consistently noted ENSO step changes.
I don’t want to say here without more investigation, that UAH has this problem, but one can visually see the step changes associated with UAH. That is a give away that the trends of the published data may be faulty.
It’s really all quite understandable. The reason they think the planet is heating up, and faster than ever is because of the Burning Pants syndrome. From all the lying, you know.
I remember some time ago reading that the number of temperature reporting sites in the US was reduced. The removed tended to be rural and higher altitude sites.
I don’t remember when that happened but I wonder if that may have had something to do with the Time’s claim?
The main GMST reconstructions going back to (January) 1850 are BEST (Berkeley Earth), HadCRUT5 (Hadley Centre / MET Office, available in both “Analysis” [ = “Infilled” ] and “Non-infilled” versions) and NCEI (/ NOAA).
The following is an attempt at a “beat them to death with their own data” approach using the BEST dataset.
The BEST dataset can be downloaded via the following URL :
https://berkeleyearth.org/data/
Open up the “+ High-Resolution Time Series” tab, then click on the “High-Resolution Monthly Global Average Temperature” link.
TIME journalists (and/or editors ?) will have a limited appreciation of any (peer-reviewed and) published science paper.
The “Foster & Rahmstorf (2026)” paper can be accessed directly at the following URL :
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL118804
.
First reactions after a “quick skim” of the paper
1) They are using annual averages when monthly (anomaly) data is available.
2) They used “backfitting” on the (lowess smoothed) dataset … what I would call either “adjusted” or “filtered” data … rather than the “raw” output of the reanalysis processes used by the original dataset teams.
From their paper (at the end of section 2.1 / the bottom of page 3 of the PDF file) :
3) They used a “binning” approach rather than the “sliding window” one I prefer.
4) They use 10-year “bins”, going from “Year [XYZ]5” to “Year [XYZ + 1]4“, when “climate science” typically uses periods of at least 30 years.
NB : On page 1 of their paper, “Received 14 AUG 2025”. Only (annual) data up to 2024 was available to them while data all the way up to January 2026 is currently available to me (for BEST, HadCRUT5 and NCEI).
5) I personally do not have the “statistical chops” to follow exactly what they did, as described in their “Methods” section.
.
Applying my “brute force and ignorance” approach
I am a big fan of the “just plot the data and look at it” first step when checking anything “sciency / mathematical” that has piqued my curiosity.
The initial results in this specific case are shown in the attached graph.
The divergence post-2015 from my “raw 30-year rolling window” approach and the Foster & Rahmstorf “filtered / adjusted 10-year binning” approach is … “eye opening” (?) …
NB : Figure 4 of their paper (on page 6 of the PDF file) shows the “Warming rate (in °C/decade) from PLF10 (linear spline with slope changes every 10 years from 1895 to 2015)” for the
a) NASA (/ GISS, i.e. the GISTEMP dataset),
b) NOAA (/ NCEI),
c) HadCRU (Hadley Centre, probably the “Analysis / Infilled” version of the HadCRUT5 dataset),
d) Berkeley (BEST), and
e) ERA5 (Copernicus / ESA)
GMST reconstruction / reanalysis products.
Note also that I “reproduced” the relevant “Median / 50%” (dark blue) line in their paper using the highly technical “zoom in and hold up a (transparent) ruler to my computer monitor” method. Independent verification may be required …
There is auto-correlation between days, and months that needs to be removed prior to doing anything to the time series. There is also seasonality. These two things can cause spurious trends when there really isn’t one.
W.M. Briggs is pretty adamant that smoothed data, averages and other techniques, should not be used in follow up smoothing. Every time variance is removed through smoothing, the variance disappears and is never seen again.
JCGM GUM-6:2020 has the following two paragraphs in Section 11.7.
Just averaging after averaging after averaging and then inputting the remaining data into some kind of model to do further smoothing just covers up so much and also increases the risk of spurious trends.