Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley downplayed the dangers of recent and ongoing extreme heat events, claiming instead that the real problem is a “mental disorder” she labeled “climate change obsession.” Finley’s flippant dismissal of any pressing environmental problem also contradicted her own paper’s news coverage of the ongoing heat waves and their damaging economic impacts, continuing a pattern in which the Journal’s opinion writers simply ignore the work of its news division.

In her July 30 column titled “Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder,” Finley, who appears to have precisely zero expertise on either climate change or psychology, wrote: “If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning.” (In fact, tens of thousands of people did not survive a heat wave in Europe just last summer, in no small part “due to the lack of air conditioning.”) 

She then cited multiple articles on how knowledge of the realities of climate change affects people’s emotions, all the while belittling those concerned about the climate as having a “mental disorder,” having “lost [their] cool,” having “mental derangement,” and finally, being “climate hypochondriacs” who “deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness.”

On August 1, Finley appeared on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. to promote her spurious commentary. During the segment, she said dismissively: “People actually go into these spirals, and they just can't stop thinking about, like, ‘Oh my gosh, what's going to happen to the world? Maybe I shouldn't be having kids, because of their carbon footprint.’ And these same kinds of phobias and anxieties that, you know, maybe paralyze people in other different realms, that is now translating to climate.”

“So, it's dictating policy on the basis of a mental disorder — is that accurate?” host Stuart Varney responded.

And while Finley claimed not to be a climate skeptic, she went on to baselessly claim that “a lot of the climate science is a little bunk.” Finley later claimed that reporting on the heat itself was part of this extant “mental disorder.”

“How many headlines do we have in the last week about — proclaiming, ‘This is the hottest month on record, we’re dealing with a dangerous heat?’” she said. “People just, they think that this is abnormal. But no, we have had heat waves for thousands of years, and somehow we have managed even without air conditioning, right. And so, somehow people now view heat as an abnormal sensation or an abnormal event, when it's not. That is in itself a mental disorder.” 

In contrast to Finley’s climate denialism and her attack on supposedly alarmist newspaper headlines about it, The Wall Street Journal’s actual news reporting has recently included such headlines as, “This June Was the Hottest on Record,” followed by “The World Bakes Under Extreme Heat,” as well as “July Heat Waves Nearly Impossible Without Climate Change, Study Says.” (By contrast, the Journal’s opinion section proclaimed in July, “Hottest Days Ever? Don’t Believe It.”)

The Journal’s opinion page has a long and storied history of ignoring facts reported in the paper’s news section on topics ranging from the right’s years-long smear campaign against the Biden family to the causes of the Texas blackouts in February 2021. The situation got so bad that in 2020 a group of 280 news reporters at the Journal sent a letter to publisher Almar Latour complaining about how the opinion section undermined their work. The reporters argued, “WSJ journalists should not be reprimanded for writing about errors published in Opinion.” In response, the editorial board claimed that “progressive cancel culture” had arrived at the Journal.