This Week in Heat Records Not Being Tied to Climate Change

The 2015 Los Angeles Marathon was run in record
heat, sending 30 runners to hospital

Winter warmth records fell across the West, but reporters didn't connect the dots to climate change. So how are we doing in March?

Heat records have fallen in the last week (or are forecast to be shattered today) from San Francisco to south Florida:

• San Francisco Bay region
• Los Angeles
• Salt Lake City
• Denver
• Montana
• South Dakota
• Minnesota
• Kansas City
• Iowa
• Florida

And how many of those articles mention global warming? Not one.

Look, I don't expect every local forecast to launch into an in-depth scientific explanation of the greenhouse effect. But at the end of a long piece on a heat wave, couldn't you drop in, "Scientists say these trends are exactly what we can expect more of in a warming world"?

UPDATE 3/17: Josephine Marcotty of Minneapolis Star Tribune gets it right. “There is a lot of scientific evidence saying that climate change is causing more extremes,” says William Glesener of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources