A new dispute over mainstream climate coverage is highlighting differences between sweeping media warnings about worsening storms, floods and droughts and IPCC assessments showing clear trends for some extremes but no detected change in several others.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A widening debate over climate journalism is focusing on whether major news organizations accurately distinguish between extreme weather events that scientific assessments show are changing and those for which researchers have detected no significant trend.
The issue resurfaced after the Associated Press published an expansive article describing increasingly severe extreme weather as a growing feature of a changing climate. Critics say that framing groups together several weather phenomena even though the United Nations’ leading climate assessment organization reports substantially different findings depending on the type of event being examined.
“Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms, floods and droughts,” Peter Prengaman, the Associated Press’ global climate and environmental news director, wrote in the AP article. “But what once seemed like the realm of fiction is now discussed as a possibility, even an inevitability.”
A Just the News examination challenged that characterization, arguing that presenting storms, floods and droughts collectively as intensifying conflicts with distinctions contained in assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC was established to assess scientific research related to climate change and periodically provide governments around the world with comprehensive evaluations of the available evidence.
According to the IPCC findings cited in the report, the observational record does not show the same trend across all forms of extreme weather.
In the United States, heat waves have become more frequent, while cold extremes have decreased. No detected change has been identified for the frequency of flooding, drought, winter storms or hurricanes, according to the findings cited.
At the global level, heat waves have also increased and cold extremes have declined. No detected change was reported for tropical cyclones, tornadoes, drought or flooding. The broader storm category — encompassing tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones and severe convective storms — likewise showed no detected change under the assessment described in the report.
Those distinctions are contained within the IPCC’s extensive Sixth Assessment Report, a collection of highly technical scientific assessments that can be difficult for nonspecialists to interpret.
That complexity leaves news organizations with considerable influence over how the public understands extreme weather trends.
Public Perception Differs From Several Reported Trends
Years of media coverage describing hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes and other disasters in connection with climate change have contributed to a widespread perception that extreme weather overall is becoming more common.
A recent Data for Progress survey found that 61% of likely voters believed the number of extreme weather events had increased during the previous five years.
Among Democrats, 72% held that view.
The results illustrate a potential gap between broad public perceptions and the more narrowly categorized trends described in the IPCC assessments cited in the report.
The debate is unfolding as climate reporting itself has become less prominent at some news organizations.
Studies examining climate coverage have documented a decline in the frequency of climate stories, while outlets including The Washington Post and NPR have substantially reduced their dedicated climate operations.
That reduction has occurred during the transition from the Biden administration to President Donald Trump’s administration.
Public disagreement also continues over climate change, its extent and attitudes surrounding the issue.
Climatologist Judith Curry, who holds a doctorate in geophysical sciences and became a prominent critic of some conventional climate-policy narratives, announced earlier this year that she would no longer maintain her influential “Climate Etc.” blog.
“Climate stupidity” had lost, Curry wrote in her final blog entry, adding that she believed it was time to move on.
Researcher Builds Public Database of Extreme Weather Trends
Amid disputes over how scientific findings are presented to the public, climate researcher Roger Pielke Jr. has developed two online resources intended to put the underlying extreme-weather measurements directly in front of readers.
His new global extreme weather dashboard tracks 57 variables covering eight categories of extremes across every continent.
A month earlier, Pielke launched the U.S. Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard, which compiles 32 variables across seven major categories: heat waves, tornadoes, floods, drought, winter storms, wildfire and hurricanes.
Rather than requiring users to work through thousands of pages of scientific assessments, the dashboards present individual measurements and their trends in one location.
“I am aiming to have a single place where people can get official data on trends in various metrics of extreme weather that have significant societal impacts. So the characteristic megafauna so-to-speak of extreme weather events,” Pielke told Just the News.
Pielke has researched extreme weather and its societal consequences since completing postdoctoral work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the 1990s.
His work has also been incorporated into major scientific assessments.
Pielke’s research has been cited by all three IPCC working groups, and he has frequently appeared before Congress to discuss the organization’s conclusions.
In May 2024, he was invited to testify before the Senate Committee on the Budget about what IPCC research shows regarding drought.
The dashboards do not attempt to determine what causes any observed change.
That type of analysis, known as attribution, examines factors responsible for a trend, including the possible contribution of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.
Pielke’s sites instead concentrate on the narrower question of whether the data show an observable change.
“Everything on the site is widely used, consensus science and consistent with the most recent IPCC,” he said.
The U.S. dashboard also includes wildfire acreage, which has increased.
Comparable global wildfire records, however, do not extend far enough into the past to support a similarly firm conclusion.
“The IPCC does not assess wildfire counts or area burned, but I included that because people are interested,” Pielke said.
Removal of EPA Climate Pages Created Another Need for Centralized Data
Until recently, the federal government maintained another public repository of climate measurements.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Change Indicators site provided information about subjects including heat waves, drought, wildfires, coastal flooding and snowfall.
The Trump administration removed the site as part of the elimination of approximately 80 climate-related federal webpages.
Pielke subsequently set out to create an independent resource bringing extreme-weather datasets together in one location.
He said his dashboards ultimately became considerably more comprehensive than the EPA resource.
The idea was not new for Pielke. He said he had envisioned building such a platform during decades of research but previously would have needed a substantial staff and considerable funding to assemble and maintain it.
Artificial intelligence changed that calculation, allowing him to build the resources without a large research team.
“It is truly amazing what is possible,” Pielke said.
The technology helped organize extensive collections of official data into a format that allows users to check individual weather trends without relying exclusively on interpretations offered by government agencies, news organizations or advocacy groups.
Pielke Says Climate Journalists Have Shown Little Interest
Public response to the dashboards has been stronger than Pielke anticipated.
“I get lots of traffic, and the sites (US and global) are being used and discussed around the world. People like data, and they like the truth. So I have a ready audience,” he said.
One audience has been notably absent, according to Pielke.
He said he has seen little interest from journalists who specifically cover climate change, despite his longstanding contention that media reporting frequently mischaracterizes extreme-weather trends.
Pielke does not argue that climate change poses no risk.
He has explicitly supported decarbonization efforts and maintains that climate change presents risks over time.
His disagreement centers instead on what he considers exaggeration or inaccurate descriptions of observed weather data.
Those positions have nevertheless resulted in Pielke being called a “climate denier,” despite his acknowledgment of climate risks and support for reducing carbon emissions.
His dashboards are intended to give readers a way to independently examine evidence when claims are made about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heat waves, drought or other extremes.
“I hope it can be used as a resource for people to get the facts, should they want them, and to hold others accountable when they misrepresent the evidence,” Pielke said.
He said neither website should be considered finished and plans to continue adding information and making changes in response to suggestions and feedback.
The broader controversy involves more than whether climate change exists or carries risks. It centers on whether individual claims about extreme weather accurately reflect the scientific evidence for the specific phenomenon being discussed.
The IPCC findings cited in the report show unmistakable trends in certain categories, including increasing heat extremes and decreasing cold extremes. They do not, however, show a detected increase across every category routinely associated with climate change in public discussion.
For critics of mainstream coverage, those distinctions are essential. A generalized claim that extreme weather is worsening can convey a substantially different message from a scientific assessment that reports increases in some phenomena, decreases in others and no detected change in several categories.
With Pielke’s dashboards making much of the underlying information easier for nonspecialists to examine, readers now have another tool for comparing claims about extreme weather with the scientific datasets used to measure those trends.
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