TIME Magazine reporter Simmone Shah claims in “Climate Change Is Accelerating Faster Than We Can Respond, Scientists Warn” that Earth is undergoing a rapidly accelerating climate destabilization that humanity is increasingly unable to handle. This is false and grossly misleading. The observational record shows a modest long-term warming trend amid substantial short-term variability, while human longevity, food production, resilience to weather disasters, and global vegetation have improved dramatically during the same period.
TIME opens with the ominous declaration that “the climate is warming up faster than we can respond,” based on a new BioScience paper titled “The 2026 state of the climate report: challenges and opportunities.” The article then barrels through warming, sea level, wildfires, heat deaths, greenhouse gases, coral reefs, tipping points, fossil fuels, and planetary “life-support systems,” giving readers the impression that civilization is watching the planetary engine check lights turn red one after another.
There is remarkably little effort to ask the most obvious question: If climate change is outrunning humanity’s ability to respond, where is the evidence that humanity is losing?
Let’s start with TIME’s central claim. Shah writes that warming accelerated from approximately 0.05°C per decade between 1880 and 1970 to 0.36°C per decade from 2010 through 2024.
That sounds terrifying until you translate it into ordinary numbers.
A trend of 0.36°C per decade is 0.036°C per year. That is about six-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit per year. No human being can perceive such a change from one year to the next, much less experience it as some runaway climatic upheaval.
More importantly, TIME compares a 90-year trend with a recent 14-year trend ending immediately after the extraordinary 2023-2024 temperature spike. That is a marvelous way to manufacture a frightening comparison, but a poor way to explain climate.
Climate Realism addressed almost exactly this claim in March in “No, TIME, the Planet Isn’t ‘Heating Faster Than Ever.’” The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) satellite record showed a long-term lower-tropospheric trend of about 0.16°C per decade since 1979, with large short-term excursions associated with El Niño and other natural influences.
NASA Science itself has described the 2023-2024 warmth as “exceptional” and investigated multiple contributors, including El Niño, aerosol changes, cloud cover, solar activity, and the enormous injection of stratospheric water vapor from the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption.
But here is the most embarrassing omission in TIME’s story: the BioScience paper itself is more cautious than TIME.
The researchers say warming “appears” to have accelerated. They then explicitly acknowledge that other analyses find the recent warming, including the 2023-2024 spike, consistent with climate-model simulations rather than evidence of a newly accelerated trajectory.
TIME doesn’t bother telling readers that.
Instead, Shah jumps immediately from the short-term warming calculation to tipping points, irreversible changes, and the possibility of reaching 2°C before 2050. That’s not explaining uncertainty. That’s stripping the uncertainty out and keeping the scary part.
Then TIME turns to extreme weather. Shah points to 2026 heat waves and wildfires and declares that the effects of an “acceleratingly warming planet” have become “impossible to ignore.” Yet in the very same paragraph she admits, “we don’t yet know enough to link these individual weather events to climate change.”
Read that again.
TIME uses individual weather events as evidence of accelerating climate catastrophe and then acknowledges that those individual events cannot presently be linked to climate change. That is not climate analysis. That’s narrative first, evidence later doomsday claim.
Wildfires are an especially poor choice. Climate at a Glance’s review of global wildfire data notes that NASA satellite observations found global burned area declined 24 percent between 1998 and 2015. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likewise acknowledges that global burned area decreased between 1998 and 2015, even while finding that fire weather has increased in some regions. More recent research continues to find a decline in total global burned area over the satellite era.
That nuance is nowhere to be found in TIME’s parade of disasters.
Then there is mortality. TIME cites a preliminary estimate of 35,000 excess deaths during European heat waves. Heat kills people, and sensible adaptation to extreme heat is important. But presenting one summer’s estimate without the broader mortality record is spectacularly misleading.
Climate at a Glance documents that deaths from weather-related disasters have fallen by more than 99 percent during the past century. Average annual deaths fell from approximately 485,000 in the 1920s to fewer than 8,000 around 2020.
That is what successful adaptation looks like.
Temperature mortality provides another inconvenient fact. A large 2021 study in The Lancet Planetary Health estimated that 8.52 percent of deaths were associated with cold temperatures compared with 0.91 percent associated with heat. From 2000-2003 to 2016-2019, declining cold mortality outweighed increasing heat mortality, producing a net reduction in temperature-related mortality.
TIME somehow manages to write an article about climate changing “faster than we can respond” without mentioning one of the clearest measurements of our response: people have become vastly less likely to die from weather.
Food tells the same story.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that global cereal production increased 27 percent from 2010 to 2024, reaching 3.1 billion tonnes, primarily because of improving yields. Oil-crop production increased 50 percent. Climate at a Glance similarly documents record-setting global crop production and yields during the period of modern warming.
Apparently Earth’s “life-support systems” forgot to notify agriculture. Plants didn’t get TIME’s doom memo either.
NASA satellite observations found that between one-quarter and one-half of Earth’s vegetated land significantly greened over 35 years, with researchers estimating that carbon dioxide fertilization accounted for approximately 70 percent of the observed greening. NASA
Human beings have been equally uncooperative with the apocalypse narrative. The United Nations reports that global life expectancy reached 73.3 years in 2024, up 8.4 years since 1995.
Think about the absurdity of TIME’s framing.
During the period in which humanity was supposedly losing its race against climate change, weather-related mortality collapsed, crop production soared, vegetation increased, billions more people were fed, and global life expectancy rose.
That doesn’t mean climate change has no effects. It means TIME’s claim that climate is changing “faster than we can respond” is contradicted by some of the most important measurements of human welfare and resilience.
Even the underlying BioScience paper recognizes something TIME’s catastrophe narrative obscures. It states that extreme-weather disasters result from interactions between climatic hazards and human social systems, and it lists adaptation measures including cooling centers, flood protection, prescribed burns, irrigation, resilient crops, early-warning systems, coastal protection, and stronger infrastructure.
In other words, we are responding. And we have been responding extraordinarily well.
TIME finishes with the report’s theatrical declaration that we are witnessing the “rapid destabilization of the Earth’s climate system” and that this is “a diagnosis of the present.”
Fine. Then diagnose the patient using all the vital signs.
Don’t show readers carbon dioxide while hiding crop production. Don’t show a European heat wave while ignoring the century-long collapse in weather mortality. Don’t show selected wildfire seasons while ignoring declining global burned area. Don’t discuss planetary “life-support systems” while neglecting global greening. Don’t claim humanity cannot keep up while life expectancy is rising and human vulnerability to natural disasters has plummeted.
Most of all, don’t take a 14-year temperature trend ending in an exceptional temperature spike, compare it with a 90-year historical trend, omit the underlying paper’s own caution about that acceleration, and then tell millions of TIME readers that Earth is careening toward irreversible catastrophe.
That’s not reporting climate science responsibly. It’s incompetent and irresponsible climate doom journalism written by a reporter who’s obviously incapable of factual research. TIME’s reporter had an opportunity to interrogate an alarming scientific paper, examine its assumptions, compare its claims against observational records, and ask whether the real-world trajectory of human welfare supports the headline. Instead, she simply amplified the alarm. I’d call it press release regurgitation.
The climate is changing slowly. Humanity is adapting rapidly. The world is not coming to an end. The only thing accelerating uncontrollably in TIME’s article is the rhetoric.
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
