It’s unfortunate when we glom onto the headline and start arguing from there, because (assuming that NBC follows the traditional newsroom workflow) the scientists didn’t write the headline, and the journalist didn’t write the headline, the news editor did, and the news editor wrote the most attention-grabbing (a.k.a. “clickbait”) thing they could.
Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not.
Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.
I don't disagree with you, but but at the same time I think that if the editor used "Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance" as the headline, probably nobody would have clicked, let alone read it. Heck, it probably wouldn't have made HN either.
Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not.
Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.