[mwill]

I mean, the second half of the article is almost entirely quotes from "Michael Wehner, a a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory"

Including the section

“You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”

That does seem more compelling and newsworthy than "feels in line for most July's since I've lived here." to me? The map might not be the greatest graphic but the article still has meat right?

[lmm]

Without statistics there is no meat; the Guardian is good at narrative but not so good at objectively reporting on trends. I see only one concrete point in the article; that the heat in certain areas broke records by 5.5 degrees is a relevant factual datum, but to understand what it actually means you have to ask things like: how many standard deviations is that? How long have these records been kept in this many places, and how many record-breakings are "normal" (I'd guess that in any given year the hot and cold temperature records would be broken somewhere).

[wesleywt]

You get these in the scientific articles, you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these. It should only include the interpretation of experts of these statistics. Not the statistics itself. That data is up to you to look into yourself...if you are an expert in the field.

[arcturus17]

The questions posed by your parent comment are rather high-level inquiries based on statistics and basic scientific reasoning.

They do not require domain expertise to answer, just a decent command of statistics and a curious mind, and I agree with the parent that they are fundamental to knowing the scientific truth.

> you cannot expect a newspaper article to include these.

Why not?

If you're driving a narrative, using hyperbolic language such as "punishing" or coining terms such as "heat dome", the burden-of-proof standards should be equally high on your part.

I'd expect any scientific reporter in a newspaper like The Guardian to have basic scientific inquiry skills, and if the hypothesis is "this is caused by humans" to try hard to refute it, and not to leave questions like that unanswered.

Is that too high of a standard?