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“The piece accurately reports the surface temperature record warming of recent decades and joins the dots appropriately to the underlying cause of human emissions. It appropriately draws the distinction between regional/national records and the global mean behaviour. The included quotes are to authoritative sources.”
This op-ed in USA Today makes the claim that Hurricane Florence has no appreciable contribution from human-caused climate change.
Scientists who reviewed the article found that it ignores the evidence for trends in tropical cyclone behavior, including slower movement speed and more intense rainfall. Additionally, sea level rise raised the storm surge of the landfalling tropical cyclone above the level it would have reached a century ago. The article cherry-picks data in misleading way to claim that recent storms are no different from past tropical cyclones…
“An accurate and balanced article that gives readers a good flavour of the research but the reference to “Earth’s history” might confuse some when it otherwise refers to the studied period: the past 3.5 million years. Neatly explains a lot of the key points in a small word count, but…”
The five scientists who reviewed the article concluded that it is accurate. It properly conveys the core facts about global sea ice extent and the attribution of continuing sea ice loss to human-induced warming of the climate—primarily in the Arctic, as the low sea ice extent around Antarctica this year has not yet been clearly connected to climate change.
“This article is mostly accurate … the frequency of massive bleaching events is increasing, will continue to increase in the near future, and these events do not need to occur annually to kill the reef. The variability of El Niño Southern Oscillation on top of the background warming trend of surface temperatures means that we will exceed the bleaching thresholds more frequently.”