Severe whether alert – it is time for news media groups to drop the charade

Dear media friends,

Please stop pretending that every time there is a severe weather event somewhere on the planet, it is because of anthropogenic climate change.

You are embarrassing yourselves.

Earth’s climate was changing long before humans came along, and the frequency and ferocity of storms have not changed in a meaningful way over the last 100+ years.

Climate science is a deeply nuanced subject (Real climate science – uncertainty and risk), and it is silly to suggest that a particular storm is the byproduct of – or made stronger by – climate change, let alone “human-caused” climate change.

You would understand this if you used sources such as political scientist and “recovering academic” Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. to add critical context to your articles … rather than consistently putting your mic in front of well-known alarmists whose predictions of environmental doom have been nothing but wrong over the last several decades.

“Experts” such as former U.S. vice-presidents and screaming Swedish teenagers provide compelling content that temporarily draws extra eyeballs, but you can only go to the wacky weather well so often before it runs dry.

Perhaps next time you run a story on a “billion-dollar weather disaster”, you could mention that storms are more costly these days because of migration and economic trends, as explained by Harry Stevens in the Washington Post:

Opal and other hurricanes failed to slow Florida’s population boom. The combined population of the 15 counties hit by Milton’s hurricane-force winds swelled from 3.7 million people in 1980 to 9.1 million in 2023. As the population more than doubled, the area’s economic activity, as captured by inflation-adjusted wages earned by the people who lived there, quadrupled over the same time period.

“It doesn’t take as much to get to a billion dollars now than it did 20 years ago,” (weather tracker Tom) Ross said. “If a storm hiccups, it gets a billion dollars’ worth of damage now, whereas 20 years ago, it took a lot more than a hiccup to do it.”

Perhaps next time you publish an article on hurricanes being more frequent and more severe “because of climate change,” you could take a look at – and maybe even publish –relevant historical data such as that showcased in the Substack writings of Pielke Jr.:

Source: Overall continental U.S. hurricane landfalls (top) and major hurricane landfalls (bottom) with linear trends as the dashed red lines. Updated from Klotzbach et al. 2018 using official data from NOAA.

Source: CSU

The figure above shows ACE per hurricane in the North Atlantic since 1900. There is considerable variability, but no overall trend (dashed red line). By this metric, North Atlantic hurricanes have not overall become more intense since 1900. 

With nearly 200 countries on the planet and smartphone cameras always on hand to provide shocking images, there is going to be a weather disaster to freak out about every day of the year.

It is our responsibility as journalists, however, to overcome the temptation to prey upon news consumers’ emotions through sensationalism and cherry-picking of data and sources.

Those practices are effective in grabbing attention, but the news industry is in tatters because you became addicted to shock journalism. And now the jig is up; people are increasingly wise to your irresponsible and inaccurate tactics.

It is our responsibility to put things in perspective.

Give it a try. It is not as difficult as you might think.