{"id":453363,"date":"2026-07-01T10:12:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T17:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=453363"},"modified":"2026-07-01T10:12:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T17:12:38","slug":"pbs-news-is-wrong-climate-change-is-not-causing-georgias-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=453363","title":{"rendered":"PBS News Is Wrong, Climate Change Is Not Causing Georgia\u2019s Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From ClimateRealism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Linnea Lueken<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recent PBS News report, \u201cFarmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable<\/a>,\u201d claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PBS reports:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMore than half of the continental U.S. is facing drought conditions. But other parts of the country are facing the opposite problem. Extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops at a time when they\u2019re already facing high production costs. Paul Solman recently traveled to southern Georgia to hear from some of those farmers. \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extreme weather being different, and even alternating, in different parts of the country is not unusual or new. The \u201cweather whiplash\u201d phenomena is an artifact of news coverage, not a real thing. Flooding often follows after a period of drought dries and hardens or compacts the soil, preventing water from soaking into the soil as a result making runoff more severe. This is a known, natural feature of recovery from drought that PBS vaguely admits later in the coverage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The state that PBS focuses on in the piece is Georgia. Their reporter, Paul Solman, interviews farmers who supposedly lived on their land for generations, and each of them insists that this year\u2019s drought conditions are unprecedented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In answer to Solman\u2019s question about whether one farmer has ever experienced drought like this year\u2019s before, the farmer said that he hadn\u2019t in his entire lifetime, and that he \u201cnever heard of stories of a drought this bad either.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another farmer says her crops suffered when rain finally came, and asserts that \u201cwe\u2019re seeing wetter wets and drier dries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A climate scientist is interviewed next, who asserts that \u201c[c]limate change is making these [droughts and deluge cycles] more frequent,\u201d making it harder for farmers to predict when to plant crops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data disagree with both farmers as well as the climate scientist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drought data<\/a> from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental information show that not only is the current drought in Georgia not unprecedented, but major prolonged droughts that were even more severe have occurred in the state several times in just the past few decades, as well as much longer ago. Drought conditions in 2011-2012 and the mid-1950s were worse than today. The most severe drought occurred in 1925, more than 100 years of global warming ago, when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were lower. (See figure below).<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Figure 1: NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate at a Glance: Statewide Time Series, published June 2026, retrieved on June 26, 2026 from https:\/\/www.ncei.noaa.gov\/access\/monitoring\/climate-at-a-glance\/statewide\/time-series<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Data show<\/a> the particular county that the first and second farmers interviewed by PBS are from, Long County, saw a bad drought as recently as the summer of 2012, when the entire county suffered D3 \u201cextreme drought\u201d conditions. The 2010-2012 drought was far more severe than this one and lasted longer. Other worse and more prolonged droughts occurred in 2007, 2002, 1990, 1981, 1954, and further back, with the worst sustained drought occurring in the 1930s. (See figure below)<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The figure above also shows the periods of wet conditions. It is clear that there are many years going back to 1900 that saw even more severe swings to overabundance of rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data<\/a> show no long term trend towards an increase in extreme short-term precipitation events in Georgia, either. (See figure below).<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Figure 2: Chart source: Frankson, R., K.E. Kunkel, L.E. Stevens, B.C. Stewart, W. Sweet, B. Murphey, and S. Rayne, 2022: Georgia State Climate Summary 2022. NOAA Technical Report NESDIS 150-GA. NOAA\/NESDIS, Silver Spring, MD, 5 pp.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

One should not blame the farmers for feeling like this year was particularly bad for drought in Georgia. The news, for one, has been claiming as much, as discussed in the post \u201cSorry, Los Angeles Times, Climate Change Isn\u2019t Driving Georgia\u2019s Wildfires<\/a>,\u201d where the media were trying to blame some wildfires this summer on the same conditions, falsely linked to climate trends. Human beings are pretty bad at recalling the full context of past years\u2019 weather conditions off the top of their heads, we often tend to feel that nothing was ever worse than what we are currently experiencing, unless the difference was really stark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The PBS \u201cjournalists\u201d should be ashamed of the slant of this coverage. They offered no pushback whatsoever on the suggestion that Georgia\u2019s drought was unprecedented or part of a pattern of worsening drought, which it is not. The data are publicly available and easily found for any intrepid reporter to discover. It seems that PBS was far more interested in using a tough year for farmers as part of a larger climate alarmist narrative push, than actually digging into the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent PBS News report, \u201cFarmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable,\u201d claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":453377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691818056,691819092,691840788,691819570,691822255,691834614,691839943,691820304],"class_list":["post-453363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-climate-change","tag-crops","tag-extreme-weather-conditions","tag-farmers","tag-georgia","tag-pbs-news","tag-production-costs","tag-united-states","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/0-ChatGPT-PBS-News-Is-Wrong-Climate-Change-Is-Not-Causing-Georgias-Drought.png?fit=1536%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1TWj","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":253164,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=253164","url_meta":{"origin":453363,"position":0},"title":"Sorry, PBS, Bangladeshi Farm Innovation Has Nothing to Do with Climate Change","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"04\/16\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"That Bangladeshi\u2019s are innovating is laudable and valuable, but their actions have nothing to do with climate change because data show no significant changes are affecting Bangladesh.","rel":"","context":"In \"Bangladesh\"","block_context":{"text":"Bangladesh","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=bangladesh"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/0N4zfMt.jpg?fit=1025%2C685&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/0N4zfMt.jpg?fit=1025%2C685&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/0N4zfMt.jpg?fit=1025%2C685&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/0N4zfMt.jpg?fit=1025%2C685&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":290399,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=290399","url_meta":{"origin":453363,"position":1},"title":"Wrong, Washington Post, Warming Hasn\u2019t Harmed African Crop Production","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"12\/07\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A recent\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0(The Post) article claims that African farmers, particularly those in Ethiopia, are struggling with crop failures caused by climate change. 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