By ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

Euronews claims climate change has evolved into a “meta-crisis” threatening food security, energy supplies, economies, water resources, and international security. This is misleading because the article largely substitutes predictions and assertions for measurements of what is actually happening. The data show global crop production and yields reaching record levels, deaths from extreme weather collapsing over the long term, and many of today’s energy and economic problems arising from political choices and geopolitical conflicts rather than changes in climate.

Euronews builds its case primarily around an interview with Emmanuella Doussis, UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy at the University of Athens. Doussis declares climate change an economic, social, political, and geopolitical problem, linking it to competition for resources, migration, water shortages, food insecurity, and the energy transition.

Those are sweeping claims. Curiously, Euronews provides remarkably little observational evidence demonstrating that climate change is actually causing the worldwide “meta-crisis” its headline announces.

Perhaps the most obvious contradiction concerns food.

Doussis predicts, “We will face a very large, serious problem with food security.” But predictions about what might happen cannot erase what is happening.

Climate at a Glance: Crop Production summarizes data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing that global crop production and yields have risen dramatically during the period of modern warming. Its latest summary reports that the 2023 and 2024 global crop years produced the two highest global crop yields per acre on record.

Climate Realism has documented the same trend repeatedly. Global production of staple crops has increased substantially, and yields have repeatedly set records during recent decades. Even where individual crops suffer poor regional seasons because of drought, floods, pests, or other causes, that is not evidence of a deteriorating global food supply.

There are good reasons for this improvement. Agricultural technology, irrigation, fertilizers, improved crop varieties, mechanization, and better pest control have transformed farming. Modest warming can also lengthen growing seasons and reduce damaging frost events in some regions, while additional atmospheric carbon dioxide generally stimulates plant growth and improves water-use efficiency.

None of this means weather cannot damage crops. It always has. It means that portraying climate change as presently creating a global food-security crisis conflicts with the direction of observed agricultural production.

The article’s treatment of energy is equally peculiar.

Euronews describes moving away from fossil fuels as part of the solution to its supposed climate “meta-crisis,” while simultaneously acknowledging that doing so creates “new dependencies” involving lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other materials. It concedes that fossil-fuel-producing nations could be economically weakened and that entirely new geopolitical dependencies would emerge.

That sounds less like a crisis caused by climate change than economic disruption caused by policies adopted in response to climate change.

Europe provides an obvious example. Energy prices do not rise because a thermometer records a slightly higher average temperature. Prices respond to fuel availability, generating capacity, taxes, regulations, subsidies, transmission costs, geopolitical disruptions, and government decisions about which power plants may operate.

Climate Realism has repeatedly documented how wind and solar cost comparisons can omit the expense of backup generation, transmission, storage, subsidies, and other system costs necessary to accommodate intermittent generation.

There is an important distinction here that Euronews blurs: costs created by climate policy are not costs created by climate change.

The same problem occurs when the article moves from energy to economics. Weather can certainly cause economic losses. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, freezes, and wildfires have done so throughout human history. But declaring climate change responsible for a generalized economic crisis requires evidence that those hazards are worsening in ways attributable to climate change.

Climate at a Glance: Extreme Weather summarizes observational records for floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and other events. The picture is considerably more complicated than the simple worsening-disaster narrative presented by much of the media.

More importantly, human vulnerability to weather has declined spectacularly.

Climate at a Glance: Deaths from Extreme Weather reports that global deaths from weather-related disasters have fallen by more than 99 percent during the past century, using international disaster data.

That is a remarkable accomplishment. Wealth, infrastructure, fossil-fueled transportation, modern agriculture, heating, air conditioning, weather forecasting, communications, engineering, and emergency management have made human beings vastly more resilient to nature.

Ironically, Doussis herself provides perhaps the most sensible sentence in the entire Euronews article: “Climate change is not always to blame.”

She acknowledges that some Greek disasters reflect chronic failures in planning, complicated regulations, inadequate infrastructure, and insufficient protection of vulnerable areas.

Exactly. That caveat deserves far more attention than Euronews gives it.

A flood becomes catastrophic when people build in floodplains, drainage systems are inadequate, warning systems fail, or infrastructure is poorly maintained. Drought becomes a water crisis when reservoirs, irrigation systems, groundwater resources, and water policy are poorly managed. A heat wave becomes more dangerous when electricity is expensive or unreliable and vulnerable people cannot afford air conditioning.

Labeling all these interconnected problems a climate “meta-crisis” does not explain them. It can actually obscure their real causes.

The Euronews article commits an increasingly common journalistic error. It begins with climate change, attaches virtually every economic, geopolitical, agricultural, and social problem to it, and then presents the resulting web of associations as evidence that climate change caused the problems in the first place.

That is not how causation works.

Climate changes. Weather varies. Individual regions will experience damaging droughts, floods, fires, freezes, and heat waves, just as they always have. Sensible governments should prepare for them.

But the real-world record does not resemble the spiraling “meta-crisis” Euronews describes. Farmers are producing more food. Crop yields continue reaching records. Humanity has become dramatically less vulnerable to extreme weather. And some of Europe’s most painful energy problems have resulted from decisions about energy production rather than changes in the weather.

Euronews could have investigated those inconvenient facts. Instead, it took a collection of predictions about food, water, migration, geopolitics, and energy, wrapped them together under the fashionable label “meta-crisis,” and called it climate journalism.

That’s not evidence. It’s a narrative looking for a crisis.