July 13, 2026
A USA Today story, “Was that climate change? Scientists ponder a deadly July 4 weekend,” claims that extreme heat in some parts of the country over July 4th weekend was caused by climate change, and is part of a pattern of climate-induced July extreme weather events. This is false. For one, it is not at all unprecedented to have extreme heat in summer, and the other weather events that USA Today references are also not evidence of climate change. USA Today relies on single event attribution studies, which are not actual data.
The article begins by claiming that “early July brought historic extreme weather for the fourth year in a row, and scientists again see the “fingerprints” of climate change in a deadly Fourth of July.” The historic extremes they point to are different kinds of weather that weren’t even actually unprecedented, in completely different parts of the world. The author cites “a record-smashing heat wave” in 2023, implying this was some kind of world-wide single event, but links to an article where heat records were described as being broken in various places across the country and the world, and in different months!
Statistics say that some kind of temperature record is broken somewhere on the planet any given day, it’s not evidence of a trend. Average temperatures have risen modestly in the world over the past century and a half, but extreme heat has not been driving those averages. As Climate Realism has pointed out in many articles covering various heatwaves over the years, data does not show that extreme heat is becoming more common, not even in the United States, which media often claims is seeing worsening heatwaves. (See figure below)
Even more embarrassing for USA Today, they then listed Hurricane Beryl in 2024 as further evidence of the “fourth year in a row” of “extreme weather” they want to attribute to climate change. That isn’t even a heatwave. It isn’t even occurring in the United States, and the “history” it made was by being an early Category 5 storm, the storm it beat was by just two weeks. This is absurd cherry-picking. Extreme weather occurs every day on the planet, and again, somewhere, SOME kind of record is being broken, especially if the net of possible conditions is cast wide enough.
There is no long term trend of worsening, or earlier arriving hurricanes, which would point towards a “fingerprint of climate change.”
Again, USA Today then points to another disconnected weather event as the evidence that 2025 was part of this supposed pattern: the deadly floods in Texas. Again, these were not caused by climate change, there is no long term trend of flood severity on the Guadalupe River. Expert hydrologists reported at the time that “this kind of outcome was a known risk.” That same river valley experienced major floods more than a dozen times over the past century, and has experienced worse floods than the 2025 one in the past, it wasn’t even a record-breaker, which makes it a bad example even among a list of bad examples for the author’s point.
The rest of the article relies entirely on the say-so of climate activist and attribution groups Climate Central and World Weather Attribution. These are not legitimate scientific bodies, and their claims regarding recent heatwaves being “virtually impossible” without climate change have been thoroughly debunked in the Climate Realism post by meteorologist Anthony Watts “No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Causing Modern Heat Waves,” so I will not relitigate them here.
This USA Today article is an embarrassing example of journalistic negligence and demonstrates a lack of understanding about weather history and how record-setting works when 365 days of an entire planet is your sample size. Heatwaves are deadly, yes, but they are not becoming more deadly or extreme over time, and their danger is easily mitigated with human innovations like air conditioning. USA Today should know these things, but they apparently prefer climate narrative over facts.
