Yeah. There appears to be evidence supporting the claim that media coverage of climate change has declined in recent years after reaching a peak.

Data from the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) at the University of Colorado Boulder, which tracks mentions of “climate change” or “global warming” in newspapers, TV, and radio worldwide, shows coverage generally increased over decades with notable spikes tied to events like IPCC reports, COP summits, and political developments.

It reached its highest levels in 2021, coinciding with the Biden administration’s green agenda, the Glasgow COP26, and post-COVID recovery discussions.

Since then, coverage has trended downward—described in sources as a “precipitous” drop starting in 2022 and continuing through 2025, with an estimated 30% reduction over the past 3–4 years in some datasets. This post-2021 decline is corroborated by:

• Reuters Institute reports (2024–2025) — noting gradual decreases in weekly climate news exposure from a 2023 peak, especially in Global North countries.
• DW and Yale Program analyses — highlighting shrinking U.S. coverage amid competing priorities like politics and economics.
• Media Matters studies — showing drops in broadcast TV climate segments (e.g., 25% decline from 2023 to 2024).

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From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

I know many of you have been feeling it. I certainly have, especially when I go look for stories to debunk from media outlets that take some press release and massage it so it reads like “turbo doom clickbait.”

There’s less of those these days and the data suggests a downward trend.

Our friend, Steve Milloy of junkscience.com posted a very interesting plot on X yesterday. Given the clues he left, I was able to replicate it with Grok.

It goes from 1988 (when Dr. James Hansen first testified before Congress about the climate scare,) to the present post-Biden era where Trump is effectively replicating Sherman’s march to the sea in the climate world.

The data comes from Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) which tracks media coverage of “climate change” or “global warming” in newspapers, radio, and TV across dozens of sources worldwide, with data starting in 2004 for global monitoring (and 2000 for US-specific).

Pre-2004 data comes from earlier studies by MeCCO founder Max Boykoff and colleagues, which analyzed English-language newspapers from 1988 onward.

Absolute article counts are not publicly available without accessing their datasets, but trends show low coverage in the late 1980s, spikes around key events (e.g., IPCC reports in 1990, 1995, 2001; Kyoto Protocol in 1997), and overall increases with major peaks in 2007, 2009, 2015, 2019, and especially 2021 (the highest since tracking began).

The peak around 2006-2007 is likely due to Al Gore’s climate movie An Inconvenient Truth gaining traction.

The peak in 2009 is clearly due to Climategate, which as you may recall, WUWT broke that story.

The plunge afterwards was the loss of faith in “The Hockey Team” of climate scientists. Since then, climate as a topic in media coverage has clawed its way back uphill, peaking in 2021 with Biden’s green agenda and EV mandate.

Coverage dipped during the 2018-2020 COVID-19 pandemic but has fluctuated with events like COP summits.

Whether this short down trend will hold depends on us. We have to keep fighting climate alarmism, calling out nonsense, be it scientific or political, when we see it.