[premium-gecko]

The Washington Post is a propaganda outlet, and this is fear propaganda. This type of organization has learned a wonderful trick, and they use it all the time: they report current events without checking for precedent. Why? Because there almost always is precedent, which makes the current event seem less alarming, which is obviously no good for them.

This story is supposed to be due to global warming / climate change, right? If so, why is it easy to find reports of the same kind of thing happening over a hundred years ago, before humans had emitted any appreciable amount of CO2?

Here's one from 1912: https://www.nytimes.com/1912/02/12/archives/hot-ocean-boils-... "HOT OCEAN BOILS FISH.; Gulf Sailors Report Passing Through Zone of Scalding Water." Inconvenient for the CO2 hypothesis, huh.

Please. Start checking for precedent when you see stories like this. I think you'll find it eye-opening.

[uniqueid]

  Please. Start checking for precedent when you see stories like this. I think you'll find it eye-opening.

The math for a big newspaper is something like 100 years x 365 daily editions a year x 100+ stories per day. It's rather hard to avoid innocent repetition after you've published millions of stories.

[premium-gecko]

I don't think innocent repetition does much harm. What I'm saying is harmful is reporting some current event as if it is new and startling and unprecedented, when in fact it's not that unusual, and has even been reported on before in that very newspaper, which would be uncovered by a search. Obviously they're not even doing that.

But why would they? They don't want to report "thing that happens fairly frequently happened again"... the story being scary translates directly into dollars going into their pockets. In other words, they terrify people by lying, for money.

[uniqueid]

  What I'm saying is harmful is reporting some current event as if it is new and startling and unprecedented, when in fact it's not that unusual

I agree the article is on the sensationalist side, but it's short of being irresponsible or grossly misleading.

A high of 50°C in British Columbia is unusual and has no precedent in recorded history (granted 'recorded history' is a blip in the grand scheme). I don't know how many Canadians it startled; I assume quite a few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...