Just days before President Trump announced that the EPA would no longer be guided on climate change by the so-called “endangerment finding,” the Washington Post’s newsroom decided to take another bite at the old “Earth is getting hotter” apple.
Contrary to their intent, the resulting story, headlined, “Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened,” made the Trump administration’s decision seem entirely logical.
The story, published Feb. 11, is a lesson in the perils of an entity supposedly focused on journalism conducting its own analysis in the field of climate science, and then producing a story that could not be more confusing if it was intentionally trying to supplant Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” as the most hilarious comedic routine ever founded on the concept of confusion.
“According to a Washington Post analysis,” the Post’s lead paragraph declared, “the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years.” The Post noted that it based its analysis on “a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025.”
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