The Department of Energy has published a new report on climate science, which comes to very different conclusions than previous reports, such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the US National Climate Assessments. Those previous reports were written by a large number of scientists and are representative of the larger community of climate scientists, while the new report was written by only five authors, who are extreme outliers in the larger community of climate scientists.

The recent extreme cold event in the US has raised questions about its relation with human-caused warming. In the public discussion I’ve noticed the broadly held misconception that global warming increases those events or makes them worse. I don’t think there is solid scientific evidence for this. To the contrary, I think the evidence indicates that, if anything, those events become less extreme and less frequent with global warming. So what causes this wide-spread misconception even from normally reliable and well-informed media outlets and public figures? Before addressing that question let me quickly document the discrepancy between media and science.