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As we enter this summer’s highly anticipated Super El Niño, which is expected to drive several extreme heat records around the world, I look back to the extreme heat coverage during our most recent El Niño event in 2023. When I do, I see a concerning recurring framing, sometimes from very reputable and well-intentioned outlets. Scientists are shocked and astonished. Climate change is out of control.
A similar thing happened last month with a different story. After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Headlines didn’t dispute this falsehood, saying scientists retired their old model, backtracked, reversed course, and now say something different.
Sure, it makes good drama. But it also implies climate scientists got something wrong. In these two cases and most others, they didn’t.
Earlier this month, I published two op-eds on what may be two sides of the same coin. On June 2, I wrote in Common Dreams on how we averted a worst-case scenario for climate change through a decade of massive clean energy deployment, which is why scientists have narrowed their range of plausible climate outcomes. On June 3, I wrote in SEJournal on how this summer could see several disastrous extreme heat records around the world and make 2026 cross the 1.5 degree warming threshold that the world committed to stay under in the Paris Agreement.
In the former piece, we rule out a worst-case scenario. In the latter, we rule out a best-case scenario. Yet when reporters cover either topic, they seem to fall into the same trap: they treat updates as a sign that scientists are confused and backtracking, rather than as an intentional process scientists use to be honest and accurate.
Climate science is not intended to be a set of perfect predictions waiting to be proven right or wrong. It is an ongoing process of narrowing possibilities, testing explanations, assessing risks, and updating what we know as facts on the ground change. When journalism flattens that process into “scientists were wrong before” or “scientists are shocked now,” it does more than just misinform. It makes science look less reliable at precisely the moment when scientists are being most trustworthy and transparent.