[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?