Major media outlets continue pushing claims that storms, floods, and droughts are increasing across the globe — despite the United Nations’ own climate panel reporting the opposite.
The Associated Press published a lengthy article this week claiming that scientists warn of intensifying extreme weather events like “heat waves, storms, floods and droughts.” The piece, written by the wire service’s global climate and environmental news director Peter Prengaman, declared that what once seemed like fiction “is now discussed as a possibility, even an inevitability.”
There’s one problem: the data doesn’t support it.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations advisory body created to provide international policymakers with scientific assessments on climate change — paints a very different picture in its official assessment reports.
In the U.S., according to the IPCC, there has been no detected change in flooding, drought, winter storms, or hurricanes.
Globally, the IPCC reports no detected changes in tropical cyclones, tornadoes, drought, flooding, or storms — which includes tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones, and severe convective storms. Heatwaves have increased, and cold extremes have declined. That’s it.
The disconnect between mainstream media coverage and the IPCC’s actual findings has prompted climate researcher Roger Pielke Jr. to create a pair of public dashboards designed to cut through the noise.
Pielke, whose research has been cited by each of the IPCC’s three working groups, launched the U.S. Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard last month. The site tracks 32 variables across seven types of extremes: heat waves, tornadoes, flooding, drought, winter storms, wildfire, and hurricanes.
This month, he followed up with a global dashboard tracking 57 variables across eight types of extremes for every continent.
“I am aiming to have a single place where people can get official data on trends in various metrics of extreme weather that have significant societal impacts,” Pielke told Just the News.
The dashboards were made possible by artificial intelligence, Pielke explained. He’d always envisioned such a resource but lacked the team and funding to build it manually.
“It is truly amazing what is possible,” he said.
The Environmental Protection Agency previously maintained a similar resource — a Climate Change Indicators website housing data on heat waves, coastal flooding, wildfires, snowfall, and droughts. The Trump administration removed it earlier this year as part of a purge of 80 climate-related websites.
Pielke’s dashboards provide only trend data measuring whether a change has occurred. They don’t undertake attribution — the analysis of why trends exist, such as contributions from human emissions. Everything on the site, Pielke emphasized, is mainstream science.
“Everything on the site is widely used, consensus science and consistent with the most recent IPCC,” he said.
Despite the clear contradiction between media narratives and IPCC findings, Pielke said the one group that hasn’t shown interest in the dashboards is reporters working the climate beat.
The public, however, has bought the media’s version. A recent poll by the left-leaning nonprofit Data for Progress found that 61% of all likely voters — including 72% of Democrats — believe the number of extreme weather events has increased over the past five years.
Pielke is not a so-called climate denier. He argues that climate change poses risks over time and has expressed support for efforts to decarbonize the economy. But he’s long criticized the media for misrepresenting extreme weather trends.
His efforts to present the science have gotten him labeled a “climate denier” by activists. The dashboards, he said, are an extension of his ongoing effort to correct misinformation.
“I hope it can be used as a resource for people to get the facts, should they want them, and to hold others accountable when they misrepresent the evidence,” he said.
Pielke said the websites aren’t done. He will continue to develop and improve them over time based on feedback and suggestions.
