Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A recent interview from NPR affiliate WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s “Northeast Notebook” titled “Apple growers confront climate change, fuel challenges for 2026 harvest,” blames low apple production in New York on “increasingly unpredictable” weather. This story is promoting a factually inaccurate narrative. If climate change was harming New York apple production, there would be evidence of this in apple production and yields over the long term, but this is not the case.
A recent interview from NPR affiliate WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s “Northeast Notebook” titled “Apple growers confront climate change, fuel challenges for 2026 harvest,” blames low apple production in New York on “increasingly unpredictable” weather. This story is promoting a factually inaccurate narrative. If climate change was harming New York apple production, there would be evidence of this in apple production and yields over the long term, but this is not the case.
WAMC published a transcript of an interview style report conducted with Hudson Valley apple growers, who WAMC says “encountered a late April frost, skyrocketing diesel prices, and a federal crackdown on foreign labor in 2026,” which have created “uncertain economic conditions.”
Sam Dingman, reporter for the WAMC’s Northeast Notebook, claimed that apple farmers need to guard themselves “against unexpected losses from increasingly unpredictable spring weather,” ultimately blaming climate change for allegedly worsening growing conditions for apple farmers in New York.
Although it is true that a late spring frost can damage yields for a season, this is normal weather variability, not climate change. Also, the good news is that late spring frosts are becoming less frequent. One need only look at the April minimum temperature data in New York to see that cold snaps are not becoming more extreme or unpredictable during apple bloom season. In fact, previous decades saw larger variation between April lows than recent years. (See figure below)
Farmers have have had to deal with bad weather every season, some worse than others, throughout history. The fact that spring blooming seasons are slightly longer today than they were a hundred-plus years ago, does not indicate trouble for crops, rather the opposite.
Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that apple production and yields in New York have risen 35 percent from just 1980 to 2025, with 2025 having seen an all-time record for production. (See figure below)
If long term climate change was damaging apple production, one would expect long-term damage to be indicated by the data, but it is not.
Previous Climate Realism articles have covered similar claims about apple production from the U.S. at large, and even Kashmir, and in both of those cases the data showed the same thing: apple production and yields have increased across the United States and the world amid the modest climate change of the past century. That is despite the fact that in the United States at least, the acreage devoted to growing apples has declined in the past few decades.
Of course apple growers in New York and elsewhere may be experiencing difficulties, like higher costs due to skyrocketing diesel prices and a federal crackdown on foreign labor, and that might have made a compelling story, but those factors have nothing to do with the story’s lede, “Climate Change.”
NPR’s affiliate station in New York is promoting a lot of nonsense in this story, in line with standard climate alarmist propaganda. One bad season for apples on certain farms can’t be blamed on climate change, that’s the truth the data shows and nothing but.
The public is tired of climate alarmism, now in its fifth decade. Regular weather news can report (and exaggerate), but climate scolds do not have the commercial interest anymore–in the US, at least.
Belle de Jong, environment editor at The European Correspondent [1], recently posted on social media:
Climate journalism is shrinking, this recent Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard piece shows. CBS lost its entire climate desk, the Washington Post cut 74% of its climate team, and NPR laid off its climate desk editor. The Media and Climate Change Observatory’s 2025 year-end analysis showed a 38% reduction in global media’s climate coverage in 2025, since the high-water mark of 2021.
She then reverses the causality to state:
The decline in weekly climate news consumption was driven partly by reduced supply, rather than a lack of interest, the Reuters Institute’s 2025 report found. People are still interested in climate news, but newsrooms stopped supplying it.
de Jong then states what she wishes were true:
All while climate change is changing our daily lives, from fatal heatwaves and floods to food prices and public health. When newsrooms get rid of climate reporters, readers lose the people trained to connect drought to bread prices or a Brussels directive to the decisions of a farmer.
People understand the decisions their governments are making through journalism. Without reporters who understand the science and the stakes, those decisions are made with far less scrutiny, and readers are left to make sense of a warming world with even less to go on than they had a few years ago.
Conclusion?
That’s why, at The European Correspondent, we have dedicated editors and staff writers across environment, agriculture, energy, and health, because they’re all interconnected. We also have correspondents in the countries where the stories are actually happening, to make sure we don’t get stuck inside the Brussels bubble. Because climate journalism is what determines whether readers understand what’s happening to their world.
Correction: The public is tired of climate alarmism, now in its fifth decade. Regular weather news can report (and exaggerate), but climate scolds do not have the commercial interest anymore–in the US, at least.
The fix is in with the Nieman report authors, SuzannahEvans Comfort (associate professor of journalism, Indiana University) and Jill Hopke (associate professor of journalism, DePaul University, and board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists). Warning of “the real peril facing climate journalism,” they opine:
The bottom line is that climate is a profoundly underreported issue. According to newly released preprint data from an international team of researchers, climate journalism makes up just 0.55% of reporting from top news organizations in the United States, with minor variations over the last 40 years.
If you are not tying extreme weather events to climate change, you are not qualified, Nieman continues. Environmental reporters know the connection, ipso facto, they cannot lose their jobs to beat reporters. But it is the beat reporters who are using common sense (like the general public) that advocacy needs to stand aside. It is not as if heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods started in the 1980s (check the time-series data yourself).
Comfort and Hopke mention the last bastion of climate alarm reporting:
A strong climate reporting corps is our best hope for thoughtful journalism that serves the public. In many ways we still have that, in dedicated teams like those at The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and in thriving specialist news organizations like Grist and Inside Climate News. It is also happening in the burgeoning creator journalist space, like the video podcast “Heated” that independent climate journalist Emily Atkin launched in February with producer Tracy Wholf, who had been laid off by CBS News in 2025.
Personally, when I take mushrooms, the last thing I want to do is think about climate change. But that’s apparently what I should be doing, according to Psychedelics for Climate Action.
Comfort and Hopke conclude: “Audiences want and need climate news.” I guess NPR and the Washington Post, et al. do not know their audiences. Dumb them. Or maybe not.
[1] “I am the Environment Editor at The European Correspondent, where I write and edit stories on climate change, biodiversity, and environmental policy. I work closely with local correspondents and agriculture, health, and energy staff writers. My background spans social and environmental policy work at the European Parliament, political communications for the 2024 European elections in Malta, and cross-border investigative journalism, including a recent piece tracing EU biofuel supply chains to illegal deforestation in the Amazon.”
On February 17, 2026, an avalanche struck north of Lake Tahoe, California, killing nine people amid a heavy, multi-day snowstorm in the area. The media falsely blamed climate change for the event. Heavy snow is common in the mountains above Lake Tahoe during the winter as are avalanches. Sadly, deaths from avalanches are all too common as well.
On February 17, 2026, an avalanche struck north of Lake Tahoe, California, killing nine people amid a heavy, multi-day snowstorm in the area. The media falsely blamed climate change for the event. Heavy snow is common in the mountains above Lake Tahoe during the winter as are avalanches. Sadly, deaths from avalanches are all too common as well.
Multiple media outlets jumped on the “climate change caused the deadly avalanche” bandwagon.
For example, Scientific American’s headline about the avalanche was titled, “Lake Tahoe avalanche explained by warm weather | Scientific American,“ In making a false causal connection between climate change and the avalanche, Scientific American wrote, “Many scientists expect rising temperatures from climate change to increase dangerous avalanches…”
The media response to California’s recent deadly avalanche is laid out plainly: weather was rebranded as climate crisis to support a narrative; yet no such connection between climate change and the recent avalanche exists.
Scientific American, The Guardian, NPR, and other media outlets, in a unified rapid response, framed the tragedy through the lens of global warming. The claim, implicit or explicit, is that rising temperatures and so-called “snow droughts” made the avalanche more likely. That framing is false, representing the media’s attempt to follow the example of flawed attribution studies that Climate Realismhas debunked multiple times.
Avalanches are weather-driven events governed by snowpack structure, storm timing, temperature swings, and terrain. The media have presented no evidence of a long-term trend of increasing incidences of avalanches because no such trend exists. Absent such a trend, the Lake Tahoe avalanche can’t be honestly attributed to climate change.
The mainstream media lurch back and forth between differing claims about the prevalence and amount of snowfall the world can expect under global warming: from claims of snow disappearing to worsening snowstorms. For years, we have been told snowfall is disappearing, that warming winters mean the end of ski seasons, and that snow will soon be a relic. Yet heavy snow years continue to occur. The Sierra Nevada experienced record-breaking snowfall in the winter of 2016–2017, a season documented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) station data. Snow in Sierra Nevada is not an anomaly. It is the norm.
NOAA’s long-term 1991–2020 climate normals for Truckee, California — available through NOAA’s U.S. Climate Normals dataset — show average January and February high temperatures in the low 40s Fahrenheit and lows well below freezing. That is a prime snow conditions period. Calling February snowfall delayed by a few weeks a “snow drought” ignores both climatology and history.
California gets snow every year. Some years, storms arrive early. Some years, they arrive late. That variability is precisely why climate is defined using 30-year baselines rather than single months.
Avalanches require a very specific set of ingredients that have nothing to do with climate. According to the National Weather Service (NWS) and Powder Magazine, here are the key ingredients for a snow avalanche:
Snowpack (Slab): A cohesive layer of snow, often called a slab, must exist.
Steep Slope (Terrain): Avalanches generally occur on slopes with an angle between 25° and 50°, with the highest risk between 35° and 45°.
Weak Layer: A buried layer of weak, loose snow that cannot support the weight of the slab above it. This can form from faceted snow, surface hoar (feathery crystals), or “up-side-down” snow (heavy snow on top of light snow).
Trigger: The force that breaks the weak layer, causing the slab to slide. This can be natural (new snow, rapid warming, rain) or, in 90 percent of cases, caused by a person (skier, snowmobiler, hiker) dislodging the snowpack slab.
Contributing Factors:
Weather: Heavy, rapid snowfall (which was occurring that day and often referred to as “loading” the slope), wind, and significant short-term temperature changes can create instability.
Human Factor: The human element, such as poor decision-making or peer pressure, is often the ultimate trigger in backcountry incidents.
That weather created the “snow loading” situation. The human factor (poor decision-making or peer pressure) put those people in the wrong place at a dangerous time.
The causes were clearly short-term and local, not long-term global climate change.
Even within the media coverage, contradictions appear. One outlet invokes a “snow drought” while quoting a meteorology professor stating the avalanche was “fairly typical for California’s Sierra Nevada” and not attributable to climate change. That alone demonstrates the leap from a single event to false long-term climate attribution.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), snow cover trends vary by region, with declines in some areas and substantial natural variability elsewhere. IPCC AR6 discusses snowpack cautiously, emphasizing regional differences and observational uncertainty. It has not found that avalanches are increasing in frequency or lethality due to climate change.
Long-term western U.S. snowpack data show significant year-to-year swings rather than a simple linear decline. NOAA’s historical station records accessible through its Climate Data Online system document winters with below-average snowfall followed by winters with record accumulation. That variability predates modern greenhouse gas concentration increases and continues today.
The broader issue is the media’s reflexive pivot to claims that specific weather events are proof of climate change. When drought strikes, it is climate change. When heavy rain falls, it’s climate change. When heavy snow falls, it is climate change. When there is little snow, it’s a “snow drought,” brought on by climate change. This elasticity ensures every outcome reinforces the same alarming narrative, but does a disservice to science. A theory should suggest conditions that can be tested and thus at least possibly disproven, not outcomes that are contradicted by other, diametrically opposed, projections or outcomes. A theory is not one based in science if it predicts multiple contradictory outcomes as possible.
The variety of headlines cataloged demonstrates something important: much of the media simply do not distinguish between atmospheric variability and long-term climate attribution. Instead, tragedy becomes narrative fuel.
Avalanches have been common throughout history in the broader region of the Western United States, long before greenhouse gas emissions began to rise, with some being much deadlier than the recent Lake Tahoe event. Snow still falls in the Sierra Nevada. Avalanches still occur in the Sierra Nevada. They occurred in 1982. They occurred in 2017. They occur today. In fact, they occur so often that the NWS has an avalanche forecast page for the Sierra Nevada region.
Declaring each avalanche is evidence of “climate collapse,” despite avalanches being common or at least not unusual, throughout history, even when temperatures were cooler and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels were lower, is not serious climate journalism. It is agenda-driven storytelling dressed up as science. The media are doing what the media all too often do, creating scary and engaging headlines that have no basis in fact. Perhaps this is why polls show trust in the media has fallen to new lows in recent months.
In NPR’s article, “Mosquitoes appear in Iceland for the first time, as climate warms,” reporter Joe Hernandez claims that climate change is bringing mosquitoes to Iceland for the first time in recorded history. Hernandez describes how three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes were discovered near Reykjavík, suggesting that global warming is making Iceland less frigid and thus newly hospitable to these insects. This is false. Mosquitoes don’t naturally occur in Iceland, and the ones that were recently found there were transported via global shipping. So, trade, not climate change, is responsible for Iceland’s recently arrived mosquitos.
In NPR’s article, “Mosquitoes appear in Iceland for the first time, as climate warms,” reporter Joe Hernandez claims that climate change is bringing mosquitoes to Iceland for the first time in recorded history. Hernandez describes how three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes were discovered near Reykjavík, suggesting that global warming is making Iceland less frigid and thus newly hospitable to these insects. This is false. Mosquitoes don’t naturally occur in Iceland, and the ones that were recently found there were transported via global shipping. So, trade, not climate change, is responsible for Iceland’s recently arrived mosquitos.
The article quotes Iceland’s Natural Science Institute as saying the mosquitoes “appeared to be able to withstand Iceland’s climate” and ties the discovery to a “warming Arctic” that is allegedly accelerating faster than the rest of the globe. NPR even frames the event as another signal of humanity’s impact on the planet, warning that “Antarctica is now the only place in the world believed to have no mosquitoes.”
This narrative, however, collapses under scrutiny. Mosquitoes in Iceland are not a sign of climate change—they are a result of travel and trade. The author admits that “the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight,” noting that there have been previous reports of mosquitoes found in airplanes landing in Iceland. In other words, this is not evolution or migration, it’s importation. Iceland did not suddenly generate mosquitoes out of thin air; it received them via human transportation, the same way other invasive species move around the globe.
Nor have recent temperatures been unusual. Iceland has experienced substantial swings in temperatures over the decades and centuries. Iceland has warmed since the 1990s, following an extended cooling period, which followed another period of warming. Recent temperatures are just now recovering to those experienced in 1930s. Mosquitos weren’t discovered during the 1930s and 1940s warm period. So, why now? The answer is the significant increase in global travel and trade since World War II.
As Climate at a Glance: Malaria and Mosquito-Borne Diseases explains, mosquitoes do not require tropical conditions to reproduce. Alaska—known for its short summers and long, frigid winters—has had enormous mosquito swarms for centuries. The state’s tourism bureau even jokes that the mosquito is “Alaska’s unofficial state bird.” Both Alaska and Iceland sit at similar latitudes and experience comparable summer daylight and temperature ranges. Clearly, mosquitoes can survive in cold climates when certain environmental niches exist, as demonstrated by the Arctic mosquito (Aedes nigripes), which thrives in tundra pools during the brief northern summer.
In fact, global malaria and mosquito-borne disease rates have declined over recent decades, even as the planet has warmed. The connection between temperature and mosquito proliferation is vastly overstated. Public health, sanitation, travel, and trade play far greater roles in spreading mosquitoes than climate.
The truth is, cold alone does not prevent mosquitoes from existing. Many species of mosquitoes have evolved to survive in subzero temperatures by overwintering in soil, leaf litter, or sheltered areas like basements and barns—the same places Iceland’s Culiseta annulata specimens were reportedly found. As the Natural Science Institute notes, this species already lives across Europe and the Nordic countries, often taking shelter “in outbuildings and basements” during winter.
It is also important to note Iceland’s geographic isolation. The island sits in the middle of the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles from any continental landmass, which is one reason why, despite the climatic conditions being hospitable for mosquitoes, they are not naturally found there. For mosquitoes to establish a population there, they would need continuous influxes of breeding pairs and suitable habitats for larvae—conditions that are exceedingly rare given Iceland’s volcanic terrain, wind, and lack of stagnant freshwater ponds. Further, the Natural Science Institute acknowledged in the article that these mosquitoes are “large species present in Europe” and that their presence in Iceland is new—not natural.
The most plausible explanation is that these mosquitoes arrived as accidental stowaways on cargo, likely from the United Kingdom or mainland Europe, and managed to persist through the mild early autumn. This is not evidence of a changing global climate—it’s evidence of an increasingly connected world. It is also not evidence that they or subsequent generations of mosquitoes will survive or thrive there. That will depend on Iceland’s management of warm stagnant pools and pest control measures.
NPR’s framing ignores well-documented entomological research showing that mosquitoes can adapt to and survive in a wide range of climates. A 2022 USGS study titled “Spatial and temporal patterns in Arctic mosquito abundance” — documents routine mosquito populations above the Arctic Circle, again supporting the notion that mosquitoes survive in cold climates. Another peer-reviewed article, “Spatial heterogeneity in the abundance and fecundity of Arctic mosquitoes,” documents mosquito populations above the Arctic Circle and their responses to environmental change
In short, NPR’s article takes a mundane occurrence—a few stowaway insects—and turns it into a symbolic tale of how climate change is causing previously unexperienced deleterious changes. While NPR blames global warming for newly arrived mosquitoes in Iceland, the evidence points squarely to increased global shipping, not melting glaciers.
By ignoring centuries of mosquito history in high-latitude regions like Alaska and northern Canada, and by failing to mention the obvious transport vector, NPR misleads readers into thinking that climate change is conjuring new species from thin air. NPR’s narrative is as false as the claims made by power hungry, progressive politicians that climate change is an existential threat to humanity.
Several major outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, recently reported the discovery of three mosquitoes in Iceland as proof that global warming has arrived in the North Atlantic. According to the coverage, the presence of the species Culiseta annulata “shows how climate change is making Iceland more hospitable for insects.”
Several major outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, recently reported the discovery of three mosquitoes in Iceland as proof that global warming has arrived in the North Atlantic. According to the coverage, the presence of the species Culiseta annulata “shows how climate change is making Iceland more hospitable for insects.”
Each story followed the same template: a small event, inflated into a global narrative. But a closer look at the facts — and the research on Arctic mosquito ecology — suggests a much simpler, less dramatic explanation.
The insects identified were Culiseta annulata, a species long established throughout northern Europe and the British Isles. As the Natural Science Institute of Iceland itself explained, these mosquitoes can “live in cold weather, usually finding shelter in outbuildings and basements.” That’s an adaptation, not a symptom of climate change.
The Institute also noted that the mosquitoes likely arrived by freight or air transport — not by natural migration. Iceland is separated from other landmasses by hundreds of miles of open ocean, and mosquitoes do not travel across the Atlantic under their own power. The explanation “arrived by freight” is found directly in the NPR story — a line that would normally end any speculation about climate causation.
If temperature and latitude alone determined mosquito presence, then Alaska, Canada, and Svalbard would be insect-free. Instead, these regions are known for their intense summer mosquito swarms.
Peer-reviewed work in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecosphere (“Spatial heterogeneity in the abundance and fecundity of Arctic mosquitoes,” Culler et al., 2018) documented large populations of Arctic mosquitoes thriving at average summer temperatures of only 4–10°C. Figure 1 in that study shows mosquito emergence occurring at temperatures barely above freezing.
A second paper, “Spatial and temporal patterns in Arctic mosquito abundance” (Coulson et al., 2022), found densities exceeding 1,000 individuals per square kilometer in Svalbard — one of the coldest inhabited areas on Earth. If mosquitoes prosper north of 78° latitude, Iceland’s isolated incident tells us little about “warming.”
Shipping, Not Shifting Climate
Even the scientists quoted in the news stories hinted at this. In the Washington Post, Australian entomologist Philip Weinstein observed that “even for a cold-adapted species, the harsh conditions of Iceland would make it more challenging for it to survive and establish itself locally.” He added that the species is “extremely unlikely to act as a disease transmitter.” That suggests a transient occurrence, not the dawn of a new ecosystem.
Transport and trade are far more credible vectors than temperature. As global shipping and air travel expand, so does the incidental movement of insects. This pattern has been well-documented in biological literature as “anthropogenic introduction” — species traveling with humans, not with the climate.
Field studies in Alaska and Svalbard reveal that mosquito abundance depends mostly on snowmelt timing and water persistence, not gradual warming. Culler et al. (2018) demonstrated (Fig. 2) that mosquito emergence peaks when surface ponds persist into late July, regardless of mean temperature. Coulson et al. (2022) found that population density correlated more strongly with standing-water duration (R² = 0.73) than with air temperature (R² = 0.12). In short: mosquitoes need puddles, not a specific climate.
Each article used nearly identical framing. The Guardian declared that “global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects.” The Post called it “a development potentially linked to global warming.” And NPR assured readers that “the Arctic region is warming at more than double the rate of the global average.”
Yet all three also admitted that cargo and human activity probably brought the insects there. That contradiction — attributing the event to both transport and temperature — highlights the problem with treating every biological observation as a climate signal.
The Arctic already hosts thriving mosquito populations. The species Aedes nigripes and Aedes impiger have adapted to subfreezing winters and extremely short summers. Alaskans have joked for decades that “the mosquito is the state bird.” That’s not new — it’s natural history.
Iceland’s isolation, lack of wetlands, and oceanic climate have prevented these species from establishing there, not because of cold per se, but because of geography and ecology. One freight container or airplane with a few stowaway insects does not change that fundamental limitation.
Conclusion
Three mosquitoes do not constitute a climate trend. They constitute a data point in the story of global trade and species dispersal. Attributing every such event to climate change risks trivializing both science and journalism.
Real ecological studies from Alaska, Canada, and Svalbard demonstrate that mosquitoes can thrive in Arctic conditions that make Iceland seem mild by comparison. Their success depends on water availability, not climate change.
So when the next headline declares that “climate change has come to Iceland — and it’s biting,” it might be worth remembering: sometimes a mosquito is just a mosquito, and sometimes, the story got there by cargo plane.
This week, three outlets – The Guardian, NPR, and Politico – ran near-identical stories on what they claim is a Trump administration “crackdown” on climate language inside the U.S. Department of Energy. At issue: an internal email to staff at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the branch that doles out billions in taxpayer subsidies for wind, solar, and other “green” projects.
This week, three outlets – The Guardian, NPR, and Politico – ran near-identical stories on what they claim is a Trump administration “crackdown” on climate language inside the U.S. Department of Energy. At issue: an internal email to staff at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the branch that doles out billions in taxpayer subsidies for wind, solar, and other “green” projects.
The supposed controversy? Staff were told to avoid buzzwords like “climate change,” “green,” “sustainable,” “emissions,” “decarbonization,” “clean energy,” and “energy transition” in official documents.
Cue the outrage machine.
The Guardian framed it as part of a “post-truth” assault on the “climate crisis,” quoting anonymous staffers warning that the DOE is “silencing science”.
NPR emphasized that the language ban extends to funding requests and websites, calling it an effort to “restrict access to information”.
Politico called it the latest attempt to “downplay the realities of climate change”.
Of course, DOE press secretary Ben Dietderich flatly denied there’s any directive against using those words, stating:
“There is no directive at the Energy Department instructing employees to avoid using phrases such as ‘climate change’ or ‘emissions.’ President Trump and Secretary Wright remain committed to transparency and fostering an open, honest dialogue about climate science”.
So which is it?
On one hand, bureaucrats say they got an email telling them to trim their vocabulary. On the other, DOE leadership denies it’s policy. In reality, this looks less like censorship and more like political reframing: Washington word-policing to avoid loaded terminology that’s become shorthand for policy activism rather than objective science.
Consider: “climate change” today is less a scientific descriptor than a rallying cry. Likewise, “decarbonization” and “energy transition” are not neutral words – they’re policy prescriptions dressed up as inevitabilities. DOE officials may be saying, “Let’s focus on the engineering and economics, not the slogans.”
And it’s not like past administrations didn’t play the same semantic game. Under Obama and Biden, “global warming” was phased out in favor of “climate change,” then “climate crisis,” then “climate emergency.” Words are weapons in policy battles. What’s new is simply who’s choosing which ones to avoid.
Meanwhile, the media is treating this as if banning a few buzzwords will stop hurricanes, wildfires, or sea level rise. It won’t. But it might stop government reports from reading like Greenpeace press releases – and that’s probably the point.
The DOE’s role should be clear: fund energy R&D that works, not promote loaded climate narratives. If that means a little less “decarbonization” rhetoric and a little more technical focus, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug.
Science doesn’t support the theory that climate change caused the Texas floods. But any attempts to have science-based discussion about the issue are being repressed.
Science doesn’t support the theory that climate change caused the Texas floods. But any attempts to have science-based discussion about the issue are being repressed.
Over the weekend, Sam Zeff, a reporter for KCUR, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, told me over X that “you wasted your money on your degree.”
I am a recent college graduate with a degree in meteorology. Zeff was replying to my post on social media, pointing out that he, and other climate activists, were ignoring basic scientific facts when they blamed man-made climate change for the tragic flooding in Texas. The truth is that the rainfall and flooding along the Guadalupe River were not historically unprecedented and had little, if anything, to do with climate change. Neither heavy rainfall nor river flooding has increased in the Texas Hill Country over the last six decades.
The devastating loss of life in Texas is a reminder of the importance of meteorology and accurate science when it comes to understanding the weather. This is no time for politics or finger-pointing from either the left or the right.
As a trained meteorologist with a passion for truth, I can authoritatively tell folks on the right that the floods were not caused by cloud seeding or “chemtrails.” Yet, when I also try to explain the data to social media users on the left, showing them that there is no evidence climate change caused or exacerbated the Texas floods, the conversations quickly devolve into insults or even threats.
Indeed, taunts from people like the NPR reporter who mocked my education have become sadly familiar.
After one of my posts on X about climate change went viral last year, I unintentionally became an online influencer.
This was never my career plan; I’d always been the kind of guy who kept his conversations among friends and avoided the spotlight. But when I started posting on social media about hard science—and what it tells us about climate change theory and energy policy—I found myself exposed to insults, organized efforts to have me kicked out of school, and even occasional death threats.
I first became interested in meteorology in high school and signed up for an X account so I could network with professionals in the field. When I first started posting, I was an acolyte of the movement that believed climate change was entirely man-made. Yet as I researched more, my views began to evolve and become more nuanced. And over the years, as my X posts increasingly challenged the orthodoxy surrounding climate change, the replies I got became nastier and the attacks increasingly personal.
Throughout college, university officials were tagged in X comments from (mostly) anonymous accounts, pressuring them to kick me out of school. What’s more, my professors received emails almost weekly from attackers saying that I was a disgrace to the meteorology program and should be punished for spreading supposed “misinformation.” Other critics would grab personal photos from my family’s social media accounts to decorate their posts denouncing me.
The viral tweet that shot me into the stratosphere was one I posted in June last year. It attracted more than 2.5 million views and over 30,000 likes. The post detailed my experiences trying to find the truth about climate change and encountering the reality that free speech can come under a sustained and ugly attack if it challenges certain cherished left-wing causes. When it comes to climate, unpopular statements—even if they are based on undisputed scientific facts—are labeled by the loudest voices in the room as “false,” “misleading,” or “misinformation.”
America has a grave problem when a culture celebrates free speech “for me—but not for thee,” as the late Nat Hentoff famously put it.
True believers in free speech like Hentoff can be hard to find these days. Today, free thinkers who won’t go along with the establishment on certain, third-rail topics—more often than not concerning race, gender, or climate—run into a ferocious opposition that seeks not just to silence their voices, but to crush them. I’ve come to understand that the vitriol directed at me is precisely because, perhaps, no one else my age with my reach is actively challenging the belief system on climate with facts and demanding answers.
I was taught that the scientific method is used to test hypotheses and theories against data to seek out truth. But many youth have been captured by the belief that mankind is bringing about the end of the world through man-made carbon dioxide emissions and that every weather event is the result of it, regardless of what the data and historical records actually show. This narrative of man-made climate change causing cataclysmic destruction is taught as fact in schools. Leading news organizations invest in “climate teams” that keep filling the news hole with one-sided reports.
That’s why I’m one of the favorite targets of climate zealots. I’m young, I have a fresh new voice, and I am, as the New York Postcalled me, “the anti-Gret Thunberg.”
It’s an interesting perch from which to witness—and participate in—the climate debate. On one hand, climate alarmists feel threatened by the fact that I used to be on their side but now, based on study and research, reject their position. They don’t like that I’m good at chart making and data analysis and can use humor to encourage people to take another look at the data and catastrophe-predicting models that, when run backwards across historical weather data, consistently get it wrong.
On the other hand, climate experts and respected professionals in the field privately message me routinely and tell me to keep up the good fight. These include high-profile meteorologists with decades of experience at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and at leading universities who have confessed confidentially that they cannot bring themselves to threaten their careers by speaking out.
In my final semester of college, I started thinking that all the blowback just wasn’t worth continuing this fight. But, as one veteran TV meteorologist told me, someone has to do it. Someone has to speak up for what’s right—the belief that in America, we have to protect the ability to say what we believe and publicly debate theories, or we will lose that right.
The tragedy on the Guadalupe River shows that meteorology is serious business. Let’s not let politics, junk science, or unchallenged orthodoxies get in our way.
What kind of religion would climate change be, without some good old fashioned conversion stories?
‘I thought climate change was a hoax. Now I’ve changed my mind’
Sarah Ott spent years believing climate change was a hoax, influenced by friends at church in the US south and a popular right-wing radio host. Here she shares her journey from being a climate sceptic to becoming an advocate for clean energy, with a passion for teaching teenage school students the science of climate change. She features on this year’s BBC 100 Women list.
I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.
When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.
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We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.
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My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.
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An independent enquiry cleared the UEA scientists of wrongdoing and concluded that “their rigour and honesty are not in doubt”.
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That’s when the big turning point came.
I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don’t remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.
Sarah Ott claims she doesn’t remember which NPR story triggered a fundamental re-appraisal of her life views.
I find this claim to not remember the details of such a life changing event a little puzzling. Why wouldn’t Sarah make an effort to share that special life changing story which can reach climate skeptics and Conservatives?
I don’t know about you, but the handful of life events which caused fundamental pivots in my values and life choices, I remember them like they were yesterday. Like the time I got so mad I finally decided to defend myself against the schoolyard bully. Such pivotal moments in one’s life tend to stand out.
Sarah accepts at face value that an “independent inquiry” concluded the Climategate scientists’ “rigour and honesty are not in doubt” – but doesn’t mention any specific emails she found troubling. Did she not bother to look at Climategate for herself?
The British BBC, which published this religious and political conversion story, would love for you heathen climate deniers to blindly follow Sarah’s example, to switch off conservative commentators and tune in to NPR, so you can have your scientific, political and religious views corrected. But they must think we are all really dumb, if this pathetic conversion story is their idea of persuasive marketing.
Jim Steele does not disappoint on correcting the constant dissemination of climate misinformation. Today, his ire has been directed towards NPR’s report attributing the destructive fire in Denton, Montana in December 2021 to climate change. Professor Jim Steele, an acclaimed geologist and ecologist, perfectly dissected the issue in a tweet, revealing the extent to which NPR missed or misconstrued the critical nuances of the story.
Jim Steele does not disappoint on correcting the constant dissemination of climate misinformation. Today, his ire has been directed towards NPR’s report attributing the destructive fire in Denton, Montana in December 2021 to climate change. Professor Jim Steele, an acclaimed geologist and ecologist, perfectly dissected the issue in a tweet, revealing the extent to which NPR missed or misconstrued the critical nuances of the story.
Steele wrote,
“I listen to NPR radio to hear what fake climate propaganda they’re pushing. Today was ‘Climate Change is Increasing the Fire Risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains’.”
Accusing NPR of fearmongering climate change, Steele goes on to explicate their flawed reasoning in blaming the Denton fire on global warming.
He continues,
“NPR blamed the December 2021 destructive fire in Denton Montana, on 70 mph winds, the supposedly unusual 56°F nighttime temperatures, and lack of snow on the ground, and suggesting it was all due to global warming. But NPR perverted well-established natural weather science.”
He points out that NPR conveniently ignored the fact that the fire was started due to high winds toppling a power line, rather than some climate-induced anomaly.
Steele also brings up the concept of the winter jet stream and its role in producing strong winter Chinooks or fohn winds in eastern Montana. Steele elucidates.
“The native Blackfeet of that region long ago referred to the Chinooks as snow-eaters because the dry warm winds remove the snow,”
According to Steele,
“Fohn winds dry as the water vapor in the rising winds, condenses leaving snow over the Rocky Mtns at higher elevations, but that also releases latent heat that warms the air which warms further as the winds descend onto the Great Plains.”
The unique climatic characteristic of the region was conveniently omitted from the NPR story.
Steele invokes historical data to emphasize his point, recalling two notable instances in Montana’s weather history.
“In December 1933 around Havre MT, just 130 miles north of Denton, Chinook winds raised temperatures 27°F in just 5 minutes, and over the next 36 hours temperatures rose by 53°F. The most extreme temperature change in a 24-hour period happened January 15, 1972, in Loma MT, just 70 miles north of Denton, when temperatures increased from −54 °F to 49 °F.”
His rebuke ends with a rhetorical question,
“I wonder how many people realize NPR is brainwashing the public?”
This is a call to the public to question the information they receive and to strive to understand the underlying processes that drive our environment.
Steele’s critique of NPR’s coverage highlights a pressing issue in the current climate conversation: the tendency to attribute extreme weather events solely to climate change. It is crucial to remember that weather is complex and influenced by many factors.
Misinformation and fearmongering narratives do little to inform the public. The need for reliable, accurate reporting that goes beyond simplistic narratives to encompass the complex reality of our climate, and scientific issues in general, has never been more important.
I listen to NPR radio to hear what fake climate propaganda they’re pushing. Today was "Climate Change is Increasing the Fire Risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains". Having blogged the story Hijacking the Winds of Change 3 years ago, it was obvious NPR was just fearmongering… pic.twitter.com/tArvUMKHRZ
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