> At sunrise, a reddish-brown snake slithers across the sky as the burned coal sends out plumes of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, lead and other metals. That malignant plume — containing 16 million tons of carbon dioxide every year — contributes to causing the very overheated weather, drought and dwindling flows of water the plant’s power is intended to relieve.

First, of all, words like "infernos", "gobble", "slithers", and "malignant" are clearly designed to provoke emotion, not just inform.

Then, the plant causes 29 percent of Arizona's pollution? How much of Arizona's power does it generate? Does it pollute more than the average for the amount of power it produces?

Then there's lumping in carbon dioxide with mercury and lead. Even if you consider carbon dioxide as a pollutant (as the EPA does), it's in a bit different class than mercury.

Then there's the connection of CO2 to the drought. That's suspected, perhaps even strongly suspected, but it's not proven. Anthropogenic climate change can cause a bunch of effects, from heat to cold to drought to flooding, but it's problematic to prove that any one effect is caused by CO2, when so many possible different effects could be caused by it.

That's just in two paragraphs of the article. That's enough for me to call both hyperbole and alarmism.

Look, the reality may be alarming. But creating an alarmist tone serves no useful purpose. For some people, it trips their propaganda detectors. For others, it creates alarm burnout. "Yeah, the world is ending from yet one more cause. Yawn. What happened on Game Of Thrones?"