It’s been quite the summer. Moscow has experienced several months of weather more akin to Texas, and is literally burning up. Floods in China have killed more than a thousand and left countless others displaced. Pakistan has experienced similar floods due to a massive monsoon season, and now they have to deal with cholera, too. The Arctic sea ice extent is not much larger than 2007, and, so far, it’s been the warmest year on record globally.

We can’t tie a single extreme event to climate change. We can tie long-term trends, like 30 years of declining Arctic sea ice, to a warming world, but we don’t yet have the technology to attribute a single anomalous season to a particular cause. In 2007, for example, factors other than high temperatures contributed to the lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record.

However, these events are exactly what we expect from anthropogenic climate change. We shouldn’t look at them as evidence for global warming, but as examples of what is to come. This is an important warning that most newspapers have been shying away from. After nearly a year of terrible climate change journalism across the board, they didn’t even mention the connection between extreme events and climate change, or the fact that this summer is a very real glimpse into our future.

I gave up on my local newspaper months ago, and I don’t regret that decision. On the handful of mornings that I’ve flipped through the paper instead of reading the Globe and Mail on the Internet (journalism of much higher quality, and it saves money and paper), I’ve seen far too many op-eds and letters to the editor saying very strange things about climate science.

However, a headline yesterday caught my eye. A fantastic article by Charles J. Hanley, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, was distributed by the Associated Press and, consequently, picked up by dozens of newspapers across the continent – including my local paper.

I became more and more pleasantly surprised as I began to read through the article:

Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says – although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.

Read the whole article here.

Hanley does a fantastic job of distinguishing between weather and climate, and stressing that we can’t yet attribute extreme events to specific causes while acknowledging that this summer’s wild weather fits with IPCC predictions and will become a lot more common in the future. He interviews our good friend Gavin Schmidt, and explains how rising greenhouse gases are “loading the climate dice” – changing the relative odds of different extremes, rather than eliminating all cold days entirely.

I stood there and clapped. I was so proud of the Associated Press, and of my local paper, that I clapped for them. I feel like there is a smidgen of hope for climate change journalism and public understanding of this issue again. Or perhaps it just comes in waves, and we’re riding our way to the top again.