The late Paul Harvey was one of the most popular radio broadcasters in history, his commentaries carried by more than 1,200 commercial radio stations and 400 Armed Forces Radio stations, with a weekly audience of more than 24 million people. One of Harvey’s popular daily segments was “The Rest of the Story,” in which he’d reveal little-known or unremarked but important details about historical events. His story gave a fuller account of the event, putting it in broader context.
This week’s lead essay puts the so-called record “global average temperature” of 2026 in fuller context, to tell “the rest of the story.”
Newspapers have been agog over temperatures this year, rife with headlines proclaiming 2026’s summer was the “hottest on record” or set records as the “hottest” in history. It has been hot, hotter than “average” for sure. Even in Texas, where I was born, raised, and live, it was hotter than usual, with temperatures above 100℉ into mid-September. And on a recent camping trip to southern Oregon, temperatures remained well above average in early to mid-October. No one denies it was unusually hot. In some locations, however, the measured daily average temperatures are problematic and hardly historically record-setting, as I will discuss below. The clause “in some locations” is critical to “the rest of the story.”
First, to be clear, “global average temperature” has no real meaning as a metric. It is made up. It is simply an adding up of recorded temperatures (already problematic and biased, in various ways) divided by the number of measuring locations (with temperatures for various nonexistent locations “filled in” to provide supposed continuity to the records. Boiling point, for example, is an actual metric. It shifts a bit with altitude, but it identifies the point at which a physical transformation takes place. The average body temperature for humans, generally considered to be 98.6℉, is a loose metric indicating the healthy norm in most instances for most people. The numerical grade structure of a classroom, assigned alphabetic letters A through F, measures student accomplishment: mastery or failure to master a curriculum established by educational authorities. Each of these is a standard against which individual cases can be measured and adjudged.
Global average temperature has no such standard against which the numerical metric has any real meaning. It has no relation to the health of the planet, because the Earth, not being a living entity, has no health. Nor does the number have any relation to the health or survival of life on Earth, because life has thrived in much hotter temperatures, such as the age of the dinosaurs, and much colder temperatures, including various “ice ages.” Whatever the temperature, Earth and some forms of life on it abide and thrive.
There is no ideal temperature, except perhaps from a god’s point of view, of which we don’t have knowledge. Choosing an ideal temperature against which to claim any modest deviation represents “dangerous” or “catastrophic” climate change for the planet is a solipsistic exercise by people motivated not by scientific truth but by left-leaning political aims. All we can say for sure is that humans and certain other species generally thrive better in warmer climates than in colder ones. That’s a fact established by the history of civilizations.
Second, as detailed across various Climate Change Weekly posts, there is a serious problem with the temperature measuring system. Too many ground-based temperature stations are polluted by the known urban heat island (UHI) effect. Formerly rural stations are now surrounded by artificial sources of heat, biasing temperatures upward, and the vast majority of stations violate the government’s own standards for use in an objective record. In addition, investigations have revealed many “stations” allegedly “reporting” temperatures no longer exist and haven’t for years. To create a continuous record, the government just makes up the data reported from many locations, based on an averaging of temperatures recorded elsewhere in the region. Finally, to add insult to injury, measured temperature station data is routinely homogenized, or adjusted, on the assumption that the stations recorded inaccurate temperatures that must be changed to fit the expected temperature. Of course, it’s just a coincidence that almost all the adjustments are upward, showing higher temperatures than were measured at the homogenized stations.
What this all means is that the “data” is suspect. Such adjustments and poor records wouldn’t be allowed in a drug trial, as DNA evidence in a courtroom, or in physics experiments. The resulting data is just too imprecise or demonstrably inaccurate.
Third, for the reasons presented above in point two, claims of record-setting 2026 summer heat are suspect. In the United States, 38 out of 50 states (76 percent) recorded their all-time high temperature records before 1955. The single decade of the 1930s recorded four times more state high temperature records than have been recorded since 2000, during the supposedly hottest quarter-century on record. In fact, the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), an extremely accurate system of temperature stations located throughout the United States, which does not require corrective adjustments to account for UHI, has recorded no significant increase in the number of temperature anomalies since its creation in 2005.
Concerning the record summer temperatures for specific locations, one must remember that those “records” were tainted by UHI, as strongly indicated by the fact that the average daily records were not caused by new high temperature records for the day but rather higher nighttime lows or daily minimums. Urbanization influences temperature station measurements by artificially warming the surrounding area, especially at night. This happens because hard surfaces such as concrete and metal absorb the sun’s energy during the day and release it in the night. Research indicates urbanization may be responsible for up to 65 percent of reported warming in cities and suburbs.
Fourth, “the rest of the story” wouldn’t be complete without a mention of how overrepresented highly developed, largely industrialized, small parts of the globe are in the temperature dataset.
Let’s leave aside the woefully inadequate coverage of temperatures for the world’s oceans and large freshwater bodies of water, which account for 71 percent of the Earth’s surface but are home to only some 1,400 temperature-recording floating buoys. This is only slightly more stations than are hosted in Australia, and less than 10 percent of the stations in the United States, the latter composing less than 10 percent of the Earth’s surface. In fact, out of roughly 25,000 to 26,000 active monthly-recording land temperature stations around the world, 70 percent to 80 percent are in developed countries or regions: North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. That leaves just 20 to 30 percent to cover the entire continents of Africa, Antarctica, Asia, and South America. This means developed nations with many highly urbanized, UHI-compromised stations are grossly overrepresented in the “global average temperature” calculation.
That number is not representative of the globe. Antarctica is 39 times larger than Germany, yet Germany has 1,800 primary and secondary weather and temperature stations, whereas Antarctica has between 55 and 70 weather stations dedicated to measuring temperature conditions full-time. New York state alone, 99 times smaller than Antarctica, has twice as many weather stations. Ask yourself how much the temperatures in Africa, Antarctica, or Asia or the southern tip of South America weigh in the global average compared to Germany, the relatively tiny United Kingdom, or the United States. When averaging global temperatures, a warm year in Europe or the United States grossly skews even widescale record-cold temperatures covering much more of the planet’s surface area in the global average “record,” simply because industrialized countries are greatly overrepresented in the sampling.
That brings me to my last point: media coverage of “record” temperatures is as biased or more so than the actual temperature dataset. Unusually high temperatures for a date or multiple dates recorded in London, New York, or Paris garner much more media attention than record-low temperatures or record-high snowfall in Lima, Peru or the McMurdo station in Antarctica. Yet this summer and even through to this fall, while supposedly record-high temperatures were being reported across parts Europe and North America, record-low temperatures and attendant horrific winter weather were hitting a wide swath of the globe that is woefully underreported by the media.
Reports at Electroverse put global temperatures and supposed record-breaking temperatures in perspective by detailing temperatures and weather conditions in parts of the world the media largely ignore. Every day, Electroverse highlights the “rest of the story,” publicizing record cold and snow in parts of the globe less covered by scientific instruments and the media.
By following Electroverse this summer, you would have noticed that on days when the press was publicizing heat waves in Europe and America, there were repeated days of record cold and snowfall in Antarctica, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and parts of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I saw no stories about this in the mainstream media. I’ll bet you missed the fact that historic winter storms and atmospheric rivers dropped as much as 15 to 16 feet of snow across Chilean Andes ski resorts such as Ski Portillo and Valle Nevado, burying infrastructure, closing mountain passes, and stranding visitors and workers for days on end. Parts of the Andes are still being hit with repeated snowfall events, keeping ski lodges open even though it is now the middle of spring in the global South.
If Antarctica and less-developed regions of the world had representative or at least similar coverage by surface station as developed countries, it is highly unlikely many of the recent years of supposedly highest-ever temperatures would have set records: the reported temperatures would have been moderated by currently unrepresented and unmeasured cooler temperatures in the 70 to 80 percent of the globe that lacks widespread temperature measuring systems.
Electroverse also posts notices from countries near the Arctic whose governments monitor the region, detailing, for example, recent large gains in Greenland icepack in the middle of summer, and the decade-long hiatus in Arctic sea ice decline. If you want to know what’s going on climatically in Afghanistan, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, beyond any headlines declaring short-term heat waves, which get covered as part of the climate crisis narrative, check Electroverse. You will find reports on record periods of cold and snow blocking mountain passes, highways, and public transit and limiting access to villages and of villagers to the outside world.
My point is not that the world is cooling. It’s not. It’s that there is another side of the story, and the rest of the story complicates and undermines the simple narrative of seemingly unstoppable momentum for catastrophic climate change.
The world is not warming. Parts of it are. Unfortunately, powerful institutions unjustifiably characterize those parts as representing the whole world. Indeed, even in the parts of the globe that show persistent warming, a large proportion of that warming is an artifact of urban development and poor management of temperature stations, neither of which is a “greenhouse gas forcing.”
That’s the rest of the story. Take it to heart. Keep calm and thrive on!
Guest author H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
This essay was first published in Climate Change Weekly #594 at The Heartland Institute October 23.
