Guest Post by: The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, and the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.
Editor’s note: This compilation serves as a fact check on the most widespread false claims made about climate change by the media in August, 2026.
Debunking claims of climate links to wildfires, hottest month, water crises & Nepal flooding
Links: USGS landslide identification, The New York Times article, NPR article, avalanche, seismic shaking, air temperature penetration of ice, Himalaya temperature record.
Links: Scientific American article, Spokane fires, 2014 Carlton Complex fire, arsonist arrested, fire burn area and temperature research, Eastern Washington temperatures, cheatgrass issue.
Links: Global News article, El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), NOAA prediction, “extremely rapid transition,” El Niño weather impacts.
Links: AP article, urban heat island effect, research on NOAA adjusted data, paper finding declines in “hottest day” values.
Links: Scientific American article, Global Change Biology paper, wildfire burn data for Europe, Europe fire emissions data, forested land burn data.
Links: Nature Communications Earth & Environment study, IPCC’s estimates, Medieval “megadrought.”
Until next month, enjoy these and other great climate fact checks at:
- No, Climate Central, Rising Cooling Costs Aren’t Due to Climate Change
- The Loneliness Epidemic is Not Caused by Climate Change, PBS News
- Wrong, Honolulu Civil Beat, One Hurricane Doesn’t Prove Climate Change
- Psychology Today: ‘How a warming world may be increasing the risk of child maltreatment’ – ‘Climate-related stressors’ linked to ‘the risk of child abuse’
- Tire Banning has arrived: Unelected California bureaucrats issue ban on non ‘efficient’ tires – Claim ‘equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road each year’
- AP goes full climate doomsday! ‘The world inches toward catastrophic climate events’: ‘Catastrophe is not a question of if, but when’
- NPR’s Claim That Climate Change Is Destroying Children’s Summer Fun Is Ridiculous
- Record Low Lake Mead: “Millennium Drought” or Inevitable Result of Demand Exceeding Supply?
- When Experts Obfuscate! How Alarmist Scientists like D. Swain, J. Abatzoglou, A. Williams Falsely Attribute Wildfires to Climate Change.
Read the original PDF, here.
The scale, the breadth and depth, of the “Man-caused climate change” hoax continues to be both maddening and disheartening. Our young receive full indoctrination by the publick skools, the media, celebrities, politicians, even the once-trustworthy Scientific American, lo how they have fallen!
Fortunately there are many people who by age, experience, and most of all observation and evidence, see a bit more clearly. But we need to get and keep the adults in charge and not the children…
..
Mr Bee-Town, U.N.-Warranted, is back, one week after,
ever-so-unchastened, continuing to preach to the Spenglerian
Let’s-All-Just-Decline-&-Die Choir.
Hasn’t read one word of D. P .Goldman’s li’l treatise
It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You / Your Civilization,
Lest he see the light of his darkly erroneous ways.
He’s still looking for that magic non-Peer-Reviewed Scientist,
while Old Benjamin Franklin is staring back at him,
on every $100-Bill that he fondles from his HVAC-engineering earnings.
Heaven save us, spare our Children, from his soul-destroying ways.
Thanking you for your Rapt Attention to this Warning,
— RLW, writing on behalf of A. Friend, Prof-Ordinarius, he’s never q-Anon
If you disagree with the scientific arguments for global warming, please submit your reappraisals to the appropriate scientific journals. I suggest: The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, the International Journal of Climatology, the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry, and Nature, among others. Your arguments will be carefully and expertly peer-reviewed. Work that involves misleading or erroneous arguments or that does not properly cite its references will be rejected. Do not expect to be taken seriously until you show, using accepted experimental and analytical techniques, that you have a credible explanation for the data on climate change. The world’s scientific community awaits your response
No it doesn’t.
The minds are already made up.
It’s all settled.
No new considerations are sought or welcomed.
Especially a Null Hypothesis!
That might be why you’re called a Science Denier
Model results might be interesting and possibly useful, but they are not data.
Yes, models are not observational data.
What you want to do is compare observations with model projections using the forcing/emissions scenario that most closely matches what actually occurred.
If observations subsequently fall within the model’s expected range, that supports the model’s ability to simulate that aspect of climate.
A good description of the model analysis in CMIP5&6
Yet doesn’t deal with actual energy distribution in and around the earth.
Doesn’t need to.
So my model of increasing ice cream sales that correlates with increasing summer temperatures means that the higher temps are caused by the sale of ice cream, got it…
I don’t think you “have it”.
Models get tweaked and tuned until they come close to “hindcasting” conditions correctly for x years (where x is an embarrassingly small period compared to geologic and even human-measured climate cycles) and then the modelers claim that all their assumptions about the effect of Man-emitted CO2 and several other factors are correct and verified and validated. And that therefore any future projections and predictions are gospel.
That’s backwards. It is most certainly not the scientific method nor is it an unbiased search for truth.
Invalid narrative. You need experience or training in the creation and use of models.
So do the climatistas…
No, you are not comparing to OBSERVATIONS. You are comparing to a meaningless average of average of average of average. Those are not observations. Even modelers admit that the models fail when compared to actually measured local and regional temperatures.
Temperatures are not good proxy for energy stored in the oceans/land and therefore are meaningless.
Something all scientists know.
“Your arguments will be carefully and expertly peer-reviewed.”
Like MBH98 was? Like the Pages2K papers were? Like Wahl and Amman… ad nauseum.
It’s possible your paper would be rejected , unless you can demonstrate competence instead of repeating Denier talking points
Not answering the question. Got it.
The irony — it burns to the bone!
Unless you submit papers that don’t agree with deniers your paper won’t be approved! Exactly what do you think happens to papers that agree with those that are different from the “consensus”? As Jeff Alberts said, why bother?
You conflate competence with ideology.
Indeed.
And the peer reviewers are the ones that use ideology.
Ask Peter Ridd.
I’m sure Peter Ridd would say what you claim. But it’s incorrect. Peer reviewed science vs random unsupported opinions on WUWT spewed by the uneducated? No contest.
No.
Prof. Peter Ridd used observations of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. His University accusers used opinions.
Look it up.
So Nature Communications is NOT a part of the Nature group? Thanks for that. Just who are they allied to?
Check out the meaning of “among others”.
So Nature should not and cannot stand on its own. Noted.
No, you incorrectly imagine.
You seem rather confused. Nobody denies that there has been a small amount of beneficial global warming in the last century, some of which can probably be attributed to human activities. The big problem is that there hasn’t been enough beneficial global warming.
Almost none of the global warming has been beneficial.
Perhaps you can expand on that and tell us about crop failures that were once a sure sign or some other feature of a warming climate has been bad or worsened, rather than simplistic statements.
science concludes that human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels—have significantly increased the frequency, intensity, and probability of many extreme weather events worldwide.
Core Conclusions of Attribution Science
It is impossible to attribute any specific weather event to global warming. Anybody claiming otherwise is either lying or delusional. The entire field of climate attribution of weather events is pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. This is the reason why no credible scientist will have anything to do with this discredited nonense.
Despite your claims, there has been no increase in severe weather events. Again you display your blatant science denial.
Science found in oeer reviewed journals is more reliable than the random opinion of a non expert
The data show no increase in severe weather events. Are you denying the data?
You are wrong:
Yes, global and national data show a clear increase in the frequency, intensity, and economic toll of severe weather events. [1] (https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/extreme-weather/), [2] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MOXnCexbY&t=103), [3] (https://www.c2es.org/content/extreme-weather-and-climate-change/)Key Findings on Severe WeatherHeat Waves: Extreme heat events have grown significantly more common and severe worldwide, with multiple record-shattering years documented globally. [1] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hiRv6UuIIY), [2] (https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/extreme-weather/)Heavy Downpours & Floods: Data from scientific organizations, including NASA Science, show that heavy precipitation events have intensified because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. Recent satellite data also reveal a sharp rise in the overall intensity and duration of extreme hydrological events like floods and droughts. [1] (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/17/nasa-data-reveals-dramatic-rise-in-intensity-of-weather-events), [2] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxJneYpiGIY), [3] (https://www.facebook.com/newshour/posts/this-summer-has-brought-a-relentless-stretch-of-extreme-weather-across-the-count/1550223820306192/), [4] (https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/extreme-weather/)Financial Impact: In the United States, the number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters has climbed dramatically. According to tracking by the National Centers for Environmental Information, recent years like 2023 and 2024 have each recorded historic highs of nearly 30 separate billion-dollar disaster events in a single year. [1] (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series), [2] (https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-services/billion-dollar-disasters), [3] (https://www.c2es.org/content/extreme-weather-and-climate-change/)
I have checked your sources. Some apply only to individual countries so can be discounted. Some appear to use only the Summary for policy makers from the IPCC so are worthless. Some are from organisations like the Guardian which spread only lies and misinformation about global warming so are utterly worthless. Some appear to use only the cost of severe weather events which has not been indexed properly to gdp figures; when this is done, there has been no increase in the percentage of world gdp spent on weather events.
The fact remains that the global data show no increase in severe weather events.
When you cite credible references for your unsupported assertions that are contradicted by the scientific research, then you can claim credibility. But so far, your answer is *crickets*
My assertions are simple factual statements; they point out the obvious problems with your links which render them worthless. The problem is that you don’t understand your own links. You thought that they supported your bizarre claims but they don’t. Your reading comprehension is appalling.
Not what IPCC says.
But ‘peer review’ may actually be ‘pal review’ – recall the CRU cabal trying to get questioners blocked from publication – or negligible review.
Perr review is review by known experts in the field. So your idea is what? Non- expert review? That idea has a negligible chance of screening out incompetent science.
Worked well here didn’t it.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/09/20/2025-nature-paper-claiming-worsening-global-drought-gets-retracted-heavily-flawed/
Have the “peer reviewed” papers on the replication problem not given you a bit of consternation at all? Data mining to find confirmation of a preconceived theory is where the term confirmation bias came from.
“Perr review is review by known experts in the field.”
Which doesn’t mean that they can’t also be “pals” that let garbage get through.
Science doesn’t conclude anything. It is a process. So right off the bat you’re wrong.
Please show your pal-reviewed charts showing increases in any of those things that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
The process is called the Scientific Method, which is used by Scientists to make Findings (conclusions).
Scientists contradict you
Concluions are made from verifying functional relationship predictions. So far all climate science has are guesses based upon correlations. Time series where time is not part of a functional relationship will NEVER be able to accurately predict temperature.
Wrong. And you haven’t proved your case. Next
Debate Failure – you don’t get to claim your own win. It is up to you to furnish evidence disproving my claim.. Good luck with that.
Richard Feynman said.
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Experiments require a functional relationship that can verify how the variables are related. Climate science does not have such a relationship. It is up to you to prove your claim that they have one.
This is called Argument by Dismissal. The debater refutes nothing, just dismisses the assertion out of hand. It’s the refuge of those who have nothing to offer. Which perfectly describes you.
Your claim is arbitrary and absurd. I don’t reply anymore to stupidity. Bye.
Attribution models are not science. They can’t do the atmosphere finely enoyugh.
Your assertion is completely contradicted by scientists.
You accuse other people of being science deniers but you have just revealed that you are the biggest science denier of all. Global warming has been hugely beneficial to the planet. Here are 55 benefits of carbon dioxide enrichment of the atmosphere.
https://www.co2science.org/education/book/2011/55BenefitsofCO2Pamphlet.pdf
Not peer reviewed science. Just a Deniers blog.
Thank you for confirming that you deny the science. As can be seen in the link I provided, the benefits of carbon dioxide are all based on the peer reviewed literature.
Your links are not Science. They’re just Denier blogs
Here is one. Do you deny the conclustionive benefits?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-25212-2
Here is another conclusion that has implications for climate science. Funny how other scientists can recognize the problem of averaging that climate science ignores.
Dont bother sending me any more of these papers. The IPCC has already reviewed the positive and the negative papers. Net, as you will recall from your 4th grade arithmetic , means positive minus the negatives..
The truth hurts, huh?
Good grief Gorman. You are hopeless. The paper you sent me REINFORCES my knowledge from reading the
peer reviewed science that there are some beneficial effects. And as the IPCC and NAS report, the negative effects are greater and strongly outweigh the positive.
In case others haven’t noticed, AB is an Acolyte of the 1st Degree of the CAGW Bible. He quotes the Bible to unbelievers, verse by verse, but has little understanding of the theology so cannot converse with the mathematics involved.
Higher night temperature is beneficial to plants and animals.
Could be. There are a few benefits. But the assessment by the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences shows the overall net effects are strongly negative
A few benefits? How about feeding an ever larger population on the globe. Or fewer cold deaths. Expanded land for easier living and agriculture..
You’re not capable of making that assessment because you’re not a professional scientist. I go with the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Which is where we are on most scientific disciplines that you don’t have the expertise for.
Near where I live in WA State, the Taylor Bridge Fire (2012) burned 23,500 acres. In 2014, the Snag Canyon Fire burned 12,667 acres. These burned to within a couple of miles of home; nearly requiring that we “go now”. The Carlton Complex Fire — much larger area — was 75+ miles to the north and so we were not directly impacted.
The 2026 Spokane area fires had reports of 846 structures burned. The number of homes destroyed is much lower (Autumn Lane – 45, Fairview – 24, Old Trails – 267 — count not complete when I got the numbers).
Counting the house I live in, there are 5 structures on my property.
Dear Mr JH,
as I best can recall, you live in the Rainshadow of Cascadia, near a certain railway town / station.
The moisture-laden air off the Pacific / Sound drenches the Western Front as it ascends (expands, cools ‘adaiabatically’), then dry-descends compression-heated into a roaring wind down your Canyons & Passes, desiccating the timber-drywood-brush, such that any spark (lightning, tire-chain on asphalt, …) may ignite a roaring wind-drive Inferno.
Is this description correct, more-or-less? The key to biospheric-survival of such Firestorms is to reduce the fuel-load, by seasonal harvesting & combusting any- / every-thing that burns … as practiced for millennia by the primitive indigenous hunters of the region. In the towns, villages & homesteads, the water-content of the home (rooftop) structures & gardens make the difference between a total loss & minimal (smoke & water) damage. Disconnecting the NG-lines, to & inside the homes, can save everything within from a flare-up, as we’ve witnessed in the case of the PacPal (Malibu) Fire, wherein ‘Exploding Homes’ disappeared even as the garden vegetation remains unscathed.
A Final Word of Wisdom lest anyone believe that The State protects Wilderness over Private Homes (as is suspected in the Maui-Lahaina & L.A.-PacPal blazes), the Opposite is certainly nearer the truth. I was able to observe this phenomenon in the case of the Schultz-Pass Blaze (near Flagstaff AZ), June of ’22. Every day (evening) we watched, even from the very Patio of the Temple-of-Doom USFS Headquarters Building on the NAU Campus, as the blaze consumed the Mountain-Forest (from 8000′ up to nearly 12000′), essentially uncontrolled to the Rimtop (exterior) level of the Inner-Basin (Caldera) of the San Francisco Peaks. Instead, the firefighting crew defended rigorously the spread toward the communities of the eastern slope / foothills extending to the Navajo (Diné) Lands, using controlled-burn lines & waterings.
But all that is beside the Main Point, which is: without liberating citizens to cull / harvest the deadwood & brush, earning whatever the market will pay for the products thus delivered, there is absolutely No Hope, No Not Ever, of avoiding these catastrophic ecosystem-destructive blazes. Everyone knows this, yet the eco-fascistic authorities deny its Truth, much as in so many other aspects of our deranged suicidal (since ~ 1970) civilization. All these things will be corrected, So Help Us Zeus, only by defunding & castrating our Enemies, which can start by thanking you for your
— Rapt Attention to this most Vexing Matter
Signed, RLW on behalf of his truth-telling Mentor, Prof Dr Albert A. Freundschaft, he remains Absolutely & Positively AI-Free
” to cull / harvest the deadwood & brush,”
The probability of doing so is Zero to at least 2 decimal places.
Authorities know the issues. Expectation is for mega-fires.
Search phrase: Era of Megafires, Paul Hessburg
What is your point?
Loss of structures results from where they were built, how much protection the owner has undertaken, where the fire started (Spokane 2026 was arson for fun), and how much suppression was used (contracted fighting on ground and from air).
How do you explain the area burned circa 1911?
You seem to prove https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/09/20/taking-us-for-fools-roger-pielke/ point that catastrophists use any disaster as proof of their claim.
Read my post asking what your point actually is, and my exposition of reasons for structure losses including arson in Spokane – and my reference to widespread fire circa 1911.
Record setting temperatures across the USA and the world. The rate of global warming continues to increase as atmospheric greenhouse gases continue to increase
Or vice versa.
Yep. Global temperatures are back above 1.5°C:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-august-was-worlds-joint-hottest-month-record-pushing-global-temperatures-back-above
Yay! Warmer is better!
You do know that 15C is pretty damn cold for humans to survive without fire, right?
Despite claims to the contrary, a warmer world has less ice
Why should we care?
and that’s a good thing for all life on this planet.
It depends on where you are talking about. In East Antarctica, warmth has apparently added a lot of ice.
https://scitechdaily.com/antarctica-gained-a-record-695-billion-tons-of-ice-in-just-two-years/
Precipitation is key – net of sublimation and snow (and rain where warm enough to have it).
Less Ice = more greening surface = more life.
What’s wrong about getting a few million more square miles of potential farmland?( well, It’s a catastrophy for those waging war on farmers, but not for the sane)
Sadly it ain’t happening as the non- accelerating sea level rise show s.
0.1 mm more per year is no acceleration – but we may lose a beach or two more before the sun explodes as result of the acceleration.
Your point?
Beware that the likely amount of warming is small, from CO2 reaches an asymptotic limit most of which has already been realized.
(Do note that eco-activists are of two minds – warmer climate means less precipitation but no it means more.)
Just which scenario is that? The one (SSP5-8.5) that has recently been disavowed?
IF they have no electricity in enough places, they will be burning things to make heat and light. I’d call that “affected by fire”. Triple might be an underestimate.
Nope, but the projection is more nuanced. “Inter-model uncertainty in projected burned area change shows clear spatial structure but is not fully consistent across modelling approaches (Figure S20). Both models tend to show relatively lower agreement in alpine and boreal regions, while higher agreement is generally found in parts of the Mediterranean region, although the strength of this pattern varies.”
Well, they are trying hard to Frankenstein 8.5 back into existence.
That is to be expected. More model runs with altered parameters is something I warned of sometime ago. “Who needs RCP8.5, our models can do what we tell them”. 😉
In theory the hottest July in American history only has to beat 249 other Julys. It didn’t, but it could, and, if it did, it would be far more likely than winning a state lottery jackpot.
Also Washington was declared a territory in 1853 and became a state in 1889. So the worst fires in the history of Washington state history would only have to beat 172 other fire seasons.
Is Earth supposed to be billions of years old? I doubt it, but I have no basis for proof so I go with the 4 billion I was told by public television as a kid.
172 years of poorly recorded Washington’s weather history vs 4,000,000,000 years of unrecorded earth history? The Time life hardcover “formation of Earth” books I paged through in 1985 showed imaginary photos of the first stages of earth – they showed a lot of molten lava. where ‘land’ would be. Seems like surface temperature would have been high. No trees I guess.
Sorry to be pedantic but you are talking about the USA not America. America as a named continent existed for centuries before the USA existed and named its different areas. It is the vagaries of English that equate the USA with America, whereas Spanish doesn’t.
“Spain did not become a country on a single day, but modern Spain formed in 1492 when the Catholic Monarchs united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and finished the Reconquista.”
Thankyou! from Canadians and Mexicans. 😉
Well, if you use the 4-5 billion years then the first question should be “How did this planet even cool down?”
We had thousand times higher methan and co2 concentrations, (almost) all water was vaporized
and on top a much much higher atmospheric pressure.
Yet all the climate gases and everything else failed and the planet got cooler than Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti-Western..
And as result we live in a world where some, only alive because of the cooling claim that trace gases like co2 and methan measured in millionth and billionth do some crazy stuff.
Maybe someone turned the sun of for a million years to start the cooling?
“Also Washington was declared a territory in 1853 and became a state in 1889. So the worst fires in the history of Washington state history would only have to beat 172 other fire seasons.”
Those early 20th century and earlier fire records are hellish. Orders of magnitude worse than the last 50 years.
WA state people should check into large areas of fire circa 1911.
AS usual, the left-leaning mainstream media, assisted by the green-funded NGOs, jump on any opportunity to exaggerate the severity of any climate variation, especially if it’s only slightly higher than normal. So it’s up to the reader/citizen to examine all the facts; then he’d find that any higher or lower figure that’s quoted is only marginally so and hardly worth reacting to.
CO2 can’t cause catastrophic runaway global warming.
I should have avoided reading this article as I knew or reasonably anticipated all discussion would be taken over by flame warriors bloating their egos by scoring “debating points.”
Don’t feed the trolls.
Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, told viewers of its primetime news bulletin that, and I quote, “August was the warmest on record for our planet”.
https://twitter.com/BrianBellia/status/2098654215484985840