[torstenvl]

It is distinctly unhelpful to keep trying to make people feel bad. People experiencing negative emotions are less capable of effecting positive outcomes.

It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative. It's hypocritical and provides ammunition to climate change deniers when they say things like "But this spring was really cold!" Weather is not climate and a year over year comparison of one calendar month is not a trend.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense article I would publish if I were a climate change denier.

[smt88]

> It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative.

I don't know if you're in the US, but this is untrue here.

Our most-watched media outlet spreads climate-change denial, as does the (minority) party that has controlled our federal -- and most state -- governments for the last few years.

One of their tactics is literally to say that there is still snow, so global warming can't be real[1].

Articles like this are the counterpoints to that narrative, and there is evidence that individual data points are convincing[2] to people who are not able (or willing) to understand long-term statistical information.

1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/02/3-years-ago-...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/03/climate-chan...

[roenxi]

If your plan is to defend the truth with lies, don't be surprised when your political opponents don't take you seriously.

The environmentalist movement has long been dogged by a sizeable aura of people who dilute the message with craziness and false claims. They are the major reason why progress is so slow - very few people trust them anywhere near anything important. I've yet to see an English-speaking Green party that I'd accept as competent to set policy even assuming they have the correct problems identified.

[everdrive]

>falsifiable claims

Surely you must mean "false" claims?

[roenxi]

Yes. I was thinking "means able to be proved false" in my head, then I took myself too literally. I fixed it.

[pjc50]

> dogged by a sizeable aura of people who dilute the message with craziness and false claims

Maybe .. but on the other hand, craziness and false claims emanating from right-wingers and even the Presidential Twitter Account seem to get taken seriously and make progress.

Scottish Green Party (separate from the Green Party of England And Wales, who do indeed have a bit of a lunatic fringe and ended up picketing their own council at one point) seem to be pretty good to me. Including sensible but difficult to implement policies like "how about we don't have a hundred-foot column of gas flame over Fife all the time".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-5... (yes, this is a pet issue, but I can see a lot of CO2 right there)

[brabel]

Do you think they should not be publishing news on the fact that this September had the hottest global temperature average on record and that the previous record had been set just last year? If this is not newsworthy, I don't know what is.

The trend is extremely scary, and we sure as hell should be scared:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[CalRobert]

Your comment supposes that people are unable to make changes to their condition though.

This kind of data is helpful for people who like to make evidence-based decisions in life. If an asteroid were heading for Earth would you want the news to ignore it?

Normalcy bias is a huge problem but if you're paying attention it is prudent to use information like this to decide where to live, whether to have kids, etc. it could have a huge impact on decisions like "Should I apply for job in Los Angeles, or Toronto?" So far, I haven't regretted moving from the place the article uses to illustrate hot weather to a cooler, wetter, more stable country.

[onion2k]

a year over year comparison of one calendar month is not a trend

I'm in my 40s and I've been seeing headlines like "hottest September on record" since my twenties. This is just the most recent one.

[CalRobert]

You will continue to see them for the rest of your life.

[tokai]

Putting your head in the sand, because of your own anxiety, will definitely not help more than articles such as this one.

[mempko]

In any important social movement, there is a large amount of people who will do nothing, there is a smaller amount of people that would provide support, and there is a much smaller group who will do the majority of the work.

The "make people feel bad" will only affect the large amount of people who wouldn't do anything anyway and who wouldn't be convinced to do anything until there is much larger social pressure.

These kinds of articles might actually inspire that smaller group do do more because it's so so bad. The data is REALLY bad. That small group will create a larger group who would provide support (financial, etc). Once a critical mass is hit, the larger group who was turned away because of bad feelings will come around.

It's more important to focus on the people who would actually do something and who would provide support. These articles and stories don't turn away the people doing all the work, it actually inspires them more.

For example, I am one of those people and this article makes me want to do more and puts more urgency into it.

[Angostura]

> It is also unhelpful to keep referring to individual points like this as illustrative. It's hypocritical and provides ammunition to climate change deniers when they say things like "But this spring was really cold!"

I don’t know why you are bringing this up. The article is talking about global temperatures and global records. Not a cold snap in your local town.

[skim_milk]

Everyone should agree with the first point that it's unhelpful to try to make people feel bad, but I don't think that is what's happening here. Healthy people, almost by definition, should be able to look at all the major headlines in the world without getting emotional and going into a spiral of depression. We both probably have parents/friends with unhealthy emotional processing habits, but we shouldn't accept our distorted reality on how normal, healthy people emotionally process news.

[pwinnski]

What do you suggest as an alternative?

Let's say we stop publishing true facts like this, in order to maintain some sort of message control. What do you propose that message actually be?

[torstenvl]

I've looked a few times, but I have been unable to find a table of global average temperatures by month for the past few decades. The only "true facts" that newspapers publish are those that are cherry-picked.

I, personally, accept climate change on faith because I defer to the experts. However, it's shocking to me how inaccessible unbiased facts are. It is conceivable that record cold temps are being set just as often. It's conceivable that nearly everything is a record if global averages are just now being recorded by month (or if they have been rebaselined after a methodology change).

Articles like this raise more questions than they answer. They aren't going to convince someone who isn't already convinced, and they only demoralize those who already are convinced.

[pwinnski]

I believe that being exposed to the same piece of information repeatedly causes us humans to believe it is true, whether it's true or not. So the evidence suggests that articles like this actually are helpful, since there are only so many times you can read that this is the warmest [month] on record before you start to believe that things probably are getting warmer overall.

But as to what you were seeking, here were my first DDG results:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

I think newspapers publish things that are news, which means it's something that happens at a given point in time. A monthly number is news, while "the past few decades" is not. An organization putting out a press release is news, so if that mentions a long-term trend, that can become news, but if it hasn't changed in any detail since the last report, then it's not really news either.

Newspapers, and news sources in generally, are really bad at communicating long-term trends like global climate change, unfortunately.

[qznc]

It depends. For quick specific actions it is a proper method to make people feel bad. Examples: "Fire! Get out!" Or "Hot September! Sign petition here!"

However, if you want people to find creative solutions to complex problems, a positive message works better. "Yes, we can!"