With all due respect to the profession of mainstream journalism, there is no such thing as rapid, catastrophic "global warming."
In fact, there are vast land and sea areas that are not warming, which seriously counters publicized statements that the world is suffering from a "global" climate condition. And claims of rapid, catastrophic "global" warming are simply fictional derivatives of imagination.
For example, the Southern Hemisphere's and tropical-latitude oceans currently have sea temperature anomaly measurements that are essentially the same as those found during the during the period of 1997-1999, some 20+ years ago.
And a critical example of a large land mass without significant warming is the contiguous land mass of the lower 48 U.S. states.
The above chart (click on to enlarge) is a plot of average U.S temperature anomalies and one does not need to be a climate scientist to discern from the plot that the fear-mongering about rapid, dangerous, and catastrophic warming is empirical nonsense.
Putting some flesh on the empirical science bones, the chart is plotted from the datasets produced by the world's only state-of-the-art climate/weather USCRN measurement system with 140 station sites all across the contiguous U.S.
Notice that since the USCRN sites went online in January 2005, over the last 14+ years the average U.S. temperature has had periods of both cooling and warming.
And when comparing the latest August 2019 12-month average (green circle) and the 8-month average (yellow star) with their respective beginning averages in 2005, it's clear that the current averages are lower.
Also, as the chart's 6th degree fitted trend line (black) indicates, the most recent warming has turned towards a cooling direction.
Based on these facts, it can be fairly surmised that the climate doomsday cult prediction of a global warming inferno is without empirical evidence, and it can justly be called anti-scientific as well. With a little greater specificity, the claim that human CO2 emissions has produced a global "tipping point" with runaway warming is demonstrably false.
For the record, including 2005, there has been 441 gigatonnes of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere through 2018, which represents an overall increase of 25%.
But where's the predicted rapid and dangerous "global" warming from all these emissions? Not in the U.S. Not in the immense waters of the Southern Hemisphere. And amazingly, not in a lot of other places: Ireland, China, Greenland, England, Finland, North Atlantic, Sweden, France, Central Europe, Japan, and other various countries.
In summary, apparently for politicians, celebrities, "journalists" and teenagers, science and empirical evidence are no longer to be taken seriously. Thus fossil fuels and their resulting emissions have become convenient scapegoats, nothing more. And wildly speculative climate change predictions are, unfortunately, tipping point catnip for the hysterical and feeble-minded.
Note: As occurs everywhere, in the U.S. during that 2005-2019 time span there were quite a few hot months; but the same can be said about cold months. When all is said and done, the hot period spans are canceled out by the cooler spans, which is what the 'average' natural climate cycle does. There has been regional warming and regional cooling as the the various regional climates continue to change; and climate expert predictions have failed to account for the non-consistent attributes of climate change.