Sick of hearing about record heat? Scientists say those numbers paint the story of a warming world: With a summer of extreme weather records dominating the news, meteorologists and scientists say records like these give a glimpse of the big picture: a warming planet caused by climate change. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-sick-scientists-story-world.html
My instinct, as a non-expert, is that what we should really be looking at is rolling-average trends rather than records, to minimise cherry-picking. Stories about records, rightly or wrongly, come across as sensationalist and potentially misleading. Am I wrong?
The climate records that are being broken regionally are a direct consequence of the trends shown above. If you read the article @readbeanicecream was kind enough to share, then you would have read that. "Records go back to the late 19th century, and we can see that there has been a decade-on-decade increase in temperatures," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, keeper of the agency's climate records."
So no, I don't think this is sensationalist or misleading at all. You just need to dig past the headline a little bit. A headline that accurately reflects what scientists are saying is a direct consequence of the general trend that's going to continue to get worse and break more records into the future.