The Hottest Year Ever? Not Even Close.

How Climate Science Erased 4,000 Years of Warmth to Make 2024 Look Like the Apocalypse Dr. Matthew Wielicki

You’ve probably seen it by now. 

National Geographic and every major outlet are screaming some version of:

• "2024 was the hottest year ever—and the coldest year of the rest of your life."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/shifting-baseline-syndrome-climate-change
It's a clever bit of psychological framing: evoke fear and inevitability in a single sentence. 

But it only works if you ignore both context and history. 

These headlines are not scientific conclusions; they are marketing slogans designed to reinforce a narrative—that today's warming is not just unusual, but unprecedented and therefore catastrophic.
That claim collapses the moment you ask a simple question:
Compared to what?

• To keep the climate panic engine running, each year must be declared the hottest, every anomaly must be historic, and every event must be framed as proof of worsening climate extremes. 
• This isn’t about science anymore—it’s about maintaining an illusion of crisis to justify more money, more control, and more censorship of dissenting views.

I’ve unpacked this manipulation in past articles. 

For example, in this critique of the 125,000-year claim, I break down the absurdity of comparing satellite-era temperatures to smoothed, proxy-based estimates from deep time...