Paul Harvey, the late, renowned radio commentator, had a popular daily segment, “The Rest of the Story,” in which he’d reveal little-known but important details about historical events. His story gave a fuller account of the event, putting it in a broader context.
Global warming has an untold side to its narrative; this is the rest of that story.
Newspapers have been agog this year, filled with headlines proclaiming that 2026’s summer was the hottest on record, or even in history. To be clear, it has been hot, in some areas for sure. Even in Texas, where I was born, raised, and live, it was hotter than usual, with temperatures above 100℉ into mid-September. No one denies it was unusually hot in some locations, yet the measured daily average temperature dataset is problematic, and the temperatures are not record-setting historically.
First, to be clear, “global average temperature,” as a metric, has no real meaning. It is made up. Global average temperature is unrelated to the health of the planet, since the Earth, per se, being not a living entity, has no “health.” Nor does it have any relation to the health or survival of life on Earth, since life has thrived in much hotter temperatures — think the age of dinosaurs — and much colder temperatures — think various “ice ages.” Whatever the temperature, the Earth abides, and some forms of life on it thrive. There is no ideal temperature, except perhaps from a God’s-eye point of view, the latter of which we don’t have knowledge of. All we can say for sure, based on history, is that humans and certain other species thrive better in warmer climates than in colder ones. That’s a fact established by the history of civilization.
Second, as detailed in various Climate Change Weekly posts, there is a serious problem with the temperature-measuring system. Too many ground-based temperature stations are polluted by the urban heat island effect. The vast majority of stations violate the government’s own standards for producing an objective record. In addition, investigations have revealed that many “stations” allegedly “reporting” temperatures no longer exist, and haven’t for years. For the sake of producing a continuous record, the government is just making up data reported from many locations by averaging temperatures recorded at other locations in the region.
As a result, claims of record-setting 2026 summer heat are suspect. In the United States, 38 out of 50 U.S. states recorded their all-time high temperature records before 1955. The single decade of the 1930s recorded four times as many state high-temperature records as were recorded since 2000, during the supposed hottest two and a half decades on record. In fact, the U.S. Climate Reference Network, which does not require corrective adjustments to account for urban heat islands, has recorded no significant increase in the number of temperature anomalies since its creation in 2005.
The rest of the story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning how overrepresented highly developed, largely industrialized, small parts of the globe are in the overall temperature dataset.
Leave aside the woefully inadequate coverage of temperatures for the world’s oceans, accounting for 71% of the Earth’s surface; of the roughly 25,000 to 26,000 active monthly land temperature stations globally, 70% to 80% are located in developed countries or regions, like North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, leaving just 20% to 30% to cover the entire continents of Africa, Asia, South America, and Antarctica. This means developed nations are grossly over-represented in the “global average temperature” calculation. That number is not representative of the globe.
For example, Antarctica is 39 times larger than Germany, yet Germany has 1,800 primary and secondary weather and temperature stations, while Antarctica has 55 to 70 weather stations. New York State alone, which is 99 times smaller than Antarctica, has twice as many weather stations. As a result, temperatures in Antarctica lack comprehensive coverage. A warm year in Europe, when averaging global temperatures, would grossly skew even widespread record cold temperatures covering much more surface area simply because industrialized countries are overrepresented in the sampling.
Media coverage of “record” temperatures is as biased as, or even more biased than, the actual temperature data set. Unusually high temperatures for a given date or across multiple dates recorded in London, New York, or Paris, for example, garner much more media attention and coverage than record-low temperatures or record-high snowfall in Lima or at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
This summer and even through to this fall, even as supposedly record-high temperatures were being recorded across parts of Europe and North America, record-low temperatures, with attendant horrific winter weather, were being experienced across a wide swath of the globe, largely ignored by the media.
One website, Electroverse, provides a broader, more complete understanding of global temperature trends. Had one followed Electroverse this summer, for example, on days when the press was publicizing heat waves in Europe and America, one would have discovered repeated days of record cold and snowfall in Antarctica, Chile, Peru, Argentina, parts of South Africa, and portions of Australia and New Zealand. For example, I saw no stories about this in the mainstream media about the fact that historic winter storms dropped up to 15 to 16 feet of snow across Chilean Andes ski resorts like Ski Portillo and Valle Nevado, burying infrastructure, closing mountain passes, and stranding visitors and workers for days on end.
Indeed, despite it being the middle of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, parts of the Andes are still being hit with repeated snowfall events, keeping ski lodges open.
If Antarctica and less-developed regions, which account for 70% to 80% of the global land surface area, had the same surface station coverage as developed countries, it is highly unlikely that many recent years labeled as record-setting temperatures would have set records.
THE CLIMATE WAR’S DUMBEST LIE: JOBS VS. NATURE
My point is not that the world is cooling, it’s not, it is that there is another side of the story, and the rest of the story complicates the simple narrative and unstoppable momentum for global catastrophic climate change.
That’s the rest of the story. Take it to heart. Keep Calm and thrive on!
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., (hsburnett@heartland.org) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
