From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

A recent article from The Guardian, “Cop30: calls for new urgency to talks as studies show global warming may reach 2.5C – latest updates,” by Nina Lakhani and Ajit Niranjan, presents a rolling narrative suggesting that the world is heading toward 2.5°C of warming and that extreme weather linked to fossil fuels is already causing increased damage. This is highly misleading if not outright false. Historical and present-day data show no increase in severe weather due to climate change having breached the previous target of 1.5°C of warming.

The Guardian says, “extreme weather supercharged by the burning of oil, gas and coal is causing death and destruction in communities across the world,” and that “studies show global warming may reach 2.5C.” It also frames every flood, drought, storm, and humanitarian crisis as evidence of an accelerating climate emergency tied directly to fossil fuel emissions.

Observational data tells a more restrained and far less apocalyptic story. NOAA tide-gauge records, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report on risk assessment both show that while the planet has warmed, the evidence for worsening trends in many extreme weather categories remains weak or regionally mixed. A copy of the table published in that report is shown below, with the highlighted yellow areas showing where climate change has not materialized as worsening events.

Hurricanes have not experienced a long-term increase in landfalls or intensity in the United States according to NOAA’s historical database, and the IPCC AR6 report expresses low confidence in any global increase in hurricane frequency. Readers can verify this themselves in “Climate at a Glance – Hurricanes.”

Floods, too, show no global increasing trend; the IPCC AR6 report explicitly states low confidence in a global signal for flood frequency or magnitude, contradicting the article’s implication that every major rainfall event is “supercharged.”

Tide-gauge data show steady, modest sea-level rise of about one to three mm per year, a rate that predates the industrial era and is not accelerating into the runaway scenarios often used in media reporting. Climate Realism has repeatedly documented these discrepancies, such as in its analyses where overstated claims about floods, storms, and heatwaves are systematically compared to real measurements rather than model projections.

Most notably, The Guardian silently moves the goalposts. For years, activists and aligned media insisted that surpassing 1.5°C would trigger catastrophe—crop failures, explosive storm activity, “unlivable” regions. Yet when the world has briefly touched that temperature anomaly in certain datasets, none of the promised apocalyptic benchmarks materialized. The limit was nothing more than a political talking point from the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, as described in this Associated Press (AP) article: The magic 1.5: What’s behind climate talks’ key elusive goal. The AP admitted, “in a way both the 1.5 and 2 degree C thresholds are somewhat arbitrary.”

Instead of acknowledging the political nature of the temperature goal posts and the failed predictions of disaster that were supposed to flow from it, Lakhani and Niranjan simply move the goal post, claiming 2.5°C as the new threshold of climate driven doom, as if simply shifting the goal post to a new supposed tipping point will keep the narrative afloat. This shameless pattern of “the world is getting hotter and it is your fault” has been repeated over and over again by the media for years.

The article also refuses to admit an inconvenient truth: There have been 30 COPS to date, and not one has reduced either global temperatures or carbon dioxide emissions or even slowed their trajectory. See the two graphs below:

These conferences and the agreements that flow from them are the supposed vehicles for planetary salvation. Based on the data shown above, thus far, they have a perfect record of failure. This is okay because there is no real-world evidence that rising CO2 levels or modest increases in temperature pose an existential threat to human prosperity or existence.

Temperatures today correlate with natural variability, the long-term recovery from the Little Ice Age, and regional land-surface warming influenced by urban heat-island effects—none of which are discussed in The Guardian article. Simply convening diplomats to issue increasingly dire communiqués has never altered these underlying drivers.

And this points to what The Guardian ignores. Weather is not climate—one month of rain in Gaza, a drought in Tehran, or a storm in Wales does not constitute a global climate trend. Infrastructure failures, deforestation, population growth in floodplains, and political conflict often explain weather-related damage far better than a mild increase in the made-up metric of global average temperature. The Gaza flooding described in the article stems from war; destroyed drainage systems, razed farmland, and shattered housing—not from marginal changes in global average temperature. The same applies to drought vulnerability in Iran, where water mismanagement and over-extraction have been well-documented for decades. Yet the authors of The Guardian’s article consistently attribute all hardship to climate change, erasing institutional and government policy failures.

Lakhani and Niranjan also fail to mention the century-long decline in temperature-related deaths—as well as decline in deaths from extreme weather. Both are a direct result of fossil-fuel-powered resilience—and it ignores the benefits reliable energy brings to developing nations.

By stitching together a tapestry of unrelated disasters and labeling them all “supercharged by fossil fuels,” The Guardian grossly misleads its readers about what observational data actually show. Moving the catastrophe threshold from 1.5°C to 2.5°C without acknowledging the previous failed predictions attached to the former temperature target only underscores how bogus the climate narrative is.

After three decades and 30 COP conferences, global temperatures remain unmoved by policy declarations, yet The Guardian continues presenting these conferences as if success at these conferences puts humans in control of a planetary thermostat. Readers deserve reporting grounded in measured evidence and proof, not a never-ending escalation of dramatic claims that shift whenever reality refuses to cooperate.