It is not uncommon for the mainstream media to use eye-catching news as bait to draw people believe in climate change. Not the climate change that’s happened throughout geologic history, mind you. No, the climate change that’s allegedly manmade and driving the world to catastrophe.

Case in point: Three years ago, the UK Independent claimed that global warming is making dogs depressed.

The Independent makes this claim based on an opinion about weather from a dog behaviorist.

The dog behaviorist spends much of her time outside walking dogs. She says “she has noticed a significant change in the weather in the past five years or so.”

The Independent goes on to claim that a large portion of the UK’s dog population is “behaving strangely” at the moment. It concludes that climate change is the reason.

“She—like many scientists and meteorologists—puts this down to climate change and expects to see more bored dogs in the future as global warming unleashes increasingly frequent and intense bouts of winter rainfall,” concluded the article.

My degree in environmental sciences, specializing in climate change, came from the University of East Anglia, where much of my research took place at the famous Climatic Research Unit. I never dreamed I’d see a major newspaper would regard dog behaviorists as experts on climate change!

Interestingly, the same newspaper in 2017 claimed that there was a “global warming pause” between 2001 and 2014—a period that overlaps by at least 3 years the “five years or so” to which the dog behaviorist appealed. So, the article contradicts what it reported on in 2016. Not surprisingly, the Independent never apologized for misleading millions of readers.

Let us for a moment forget the hypocrisy and analyze the claims made in the 2016 article, for the sake our dogs, and because other reports continue to peddle lies like this one.

Yes, 2016 was one of the warmest in the past two decades. But its warmth was due to cyclic changes in ocean temperatures, also known as El Niño.

Temperatures began dropping soon after, and 2018 was cooler than the preceding three years. The winter of 2017–2018 saw record low temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and unprecedented snow in various parts of North America and Europe.

Moreover, global temperature levels during the past five years were hardly any different from those experienced during 1997 and 1998.

Yet dogs survived. In fact, both humans and dogs survived the 90-degree Fahrenheit London heat waves of 1937 and the highest recorded temperature (100 degrees Fahrenheit) on August 10, 2003.

Dogs not only have experienced similar temperatures in the past but also they have been largely unaffected by them.

Moreover, the article’s claim that “global warming unleashes increasingly frequent and intense bouts of winter rainfall” is untrue, not only globally but specifically in the UK. UK winter rainfall data since 1910 reveal that there has been no significant increase in winter rainfall intensity, either recently or during the entire period. For example, rainfall in the extreme El Niño winter of 2015/16 was only 9 mm more than the year 1914/15. Indeed, despite the 2015/16 blip, the trend for the entire period (dotted red below) is slightly downward!

So, in its vain attempt to prove a dog behaviorist right, the Independent resorted to two big lies: (1) that global warming is extreme, and (2) that winter rainfall was increasing.

The only truth in the article is that dogs respond to changes in weather. But that proves nothing about climate change. Cheers, or barks, to the dogs. They have seen worse weather and have come through fine.