No Atlantic hurricane had formed by mid-September during the historically quiet 2026 season, as former climate reporter Lucy Biggers said she once avoided stories that complicated the prevailing climate-change narrative.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season reached its traditional September peak without producing a hurricane, an unusual stretch that a former climate reporter says illustrates how newsrooms can give less attention to weather developments that do not reinforce expectations of worsening climate disasters.
Lucy Biggers, a former climate journalist and activist who now works for The Free Press, said this week that she consciously avoided reporting developments she considered positive while covering climate issues because she believed they would interfere with a broader narrative portraying climate change as an existential threat.
“When I was a climate reporter, I never covered positive climate stories because it would ‘muddy the narrative’ that climate change was an existential threat,” Biggers wrote Tuesday, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation report. “No one told me to behave this way. I chose to do this of my own volition.”
Biggers pointed to this year’s Atlantic hurricane season as an example.
Only five tropical storms had formed, and none had developed into hurricanes, according to The Weather Channel.
The season also established a satellite-era record Saturday for the latest point in the calendar without the Atlantic producing its first hurricane, according to CBS News. The satellite era dates to 1966.
“I think this is why we rarely see events like this year’s historically quiet eastern hurricane season covered widely by the news,” Biggers wrote. “Many reporters believe covering it will ‘give fodder to climate change deniers.’”
Biggers said her own decisions as a reporter were not the result of an editor or supervisor ordering her to suppress particular stories.
“[I]t was mostly soft self-censorship. I knew what the accepted beliefs of the climate movement were, and I wasn’t going to stick my neck out and challenge them. That would have been so much work and threatened my standing within the group,” Biggers said.
“So I ignored anything that challenged the mainstream understanding of climate change anything positive about plastics, fossil fuels, or capitalism. I stayed away from those topics because I was protecting my own neck and wanted to fit in with the group,” she added.
Biggers previously worked for NowThis News and has described herself as a former climate activist. In an earlier discussion of her experience, she said she spent years accepting arguments made within the climate movement without independently examining them as critically as she now believes she should have.
She said she believes similar pressures remain present in climate journalism.
“I would say it is still common today. You can see it with the quiet east coast hurricane season we’re experiencing right now. Nobody is covering it in the same way they would if we were having a very active hurricane season on the East Coast,” Biggers said.
“If that were happening, we would never hear the end of it. But because the story doesn’t confirm a dangerous climate catastrophe, newsrooms are less inclined to cover it.”
Several major news organizations have, however, reported on the unusual absence of hurricanes this season, including The Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Meteorologists have attributed much of the suppressed Atlantic activity this year to a strong El Niño rather than treating a single quiet season as evidence for or against longer-term climate trends.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that El Niño conditions tend to increase vertical wind shear across the tropical Atlantic. Strong wind shear can interfere with the organization and development of tropical systems, making conditions less favorable for hurricanes.
The quiet start also does not mean the season is finished.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially continues through Nov. 30, according to the National Hurricane Center, leaving more than two months during which additional tropical systems could develop.
Biggers said during a May appearance on TRIGGERnometry that her views about climate reporting changed after reconsidering how she had approached the subject during her 20s.
“I basically spent half my twenties, kind of just buying everything as it was sold to me. Never really investigating,” Biggers said.
She said she had come to accept the proposition that climate change represented an existential threat even though she now believes she did not have a sufficiently deep understanding of the underlying climate science.
“That was how turned off my critical thinking was, because I was getting so much support from being part of this movement that I just pushed it,” Biggers said.
She also criticized what she views as an imbalance between news coverage of projections about future climate conditions and reporting on observed data.
“Climate reporters now frequently cover studies that project a frightening future without looking at the empirical evidence we already have,” Biggers said.
The hurricane season has also generated political commentary.
“Thank you, President Trump!” the White House Rapid Response 47 account wrote Sunday in response to meteorologist Chris Martz discussing the lack of Atlantic hurricanes.
Martz had described the season as historic, writing that no hurricane had formed in the North Atlantic through Sept. 12. He said it was the first time since the satellite era began in 1966 that the basin had reached that date without producing a hurricane.
Martz also said year-to-date accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE, was at its lowest level since 1941. ACE is a measurement that incorporates the strength and duration of tropical cyclones to provide an indication of overall seasonal activity.
The absence of hurricanes through the climatological peak of the season represents an unusual weather event, but one season alone does not establish a long-term climate trend. This year’s activity has occurred under atmospheric conditions that meteorologists say have been particularly unfavorable for Atlantic hurricane development.
Biggers’ broader criticism instead centers on how those differing types of weather events are selected and presented by news organizations.
“When frightening weather occurs, the news harps on it endlessly. The positive stories are rarely covered at all,” Biggers said.
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