Al Jazeera (AJ) recently published an article titled “Drought in the east, floods in the south: Africa battered by climate change” by Haru Mutasa, in which the reporter details recent experiences of drought in East Africa and flooding in southern Africa, asserting that those weather events are proof that climate change is battering the continent. [some emphasis, links added]
This is false.
The article relies on flimsy content such as personal observation, interviews, and evocative imagery to imply causation, ignoring data and trends that show no appreciable changes in flood or drought patterns over time.
Mutasa asserts that “rising seas and intensifying storms” and shifting rainfall patterns are already devastating livelihoods, citing the author’s personal field observations as evidence of a broader climate crisis.
Readers are shown photos of dry riverbeds, dead livestock, submerged neighborhoods, and distressed residents, then invited to connect these scenes directly to global warming.
The emotional impact is real, but emotion is not evidence.
Let us start with AJ’s most basic error: weather is not climate. Climate is defined by long-term patterns measured over decades, typically 30 years or more. A drought in one region followed by floods in another over a few weeks or months says nothing about a durable climate trend.
Africa’s climate has always been highly variable, with sharp swings driven by ocean–atmosphere cycles such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole.
Short-term extremes—sometimes back-to-back—are a known feature of the region, not a recently discovered diagnostic proof of climate change.
The historical record bears this out. Southern and eastern Africa experienced severe droughts and catastrophic floods long before modern greenhouse gas emissions rose.
Mozambique’s Limpopo River basin featured prominently in the article’s flood imagery. The area has a long history of major inundations, including the devastating 2000 Mozambique floods, which displaced hundreds of thousands and occurred during a strong El Niño year.
East Africa’s Horn has likewise seen repeated, multi-year droughts throughout the 20th century, interspersed with episodes of extreme rainfall. These precedents matter because they show that today’s events are consistent with a long pattern of variability rather than proving a novel climate regime.
In fact, science has shown a 50-year seasonal variability across centuries in East African droughts and floods recorded in lake sediments.
When measured data are consulted instead of anecdotes, the alarm bells fade. Climate at a Glance summarizes the global evidence in “Floods” and “Drought,” explaining that there is low confidence in any increasing trend of global flood frequency or magnitude and that drought trends are regionally mixed, not universally worsening.
These conclusions align with the cautious language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which emphasizes uncertainty and regional variability rather than blanket claims of intensification.
The AJ article substitutes interviews for analysis.
Quoting residents and aid workers about hardship may document suffering, but it does not diagnose the cause. Infrastructure deficits, land-use changes, deforestation, river management, dam releases upstream, population growth in floodplains, and limited early-warning systems all play decisive roles in disaster outcomes across Africa.
Climate Realism has repeatedly shown how media coverage overlooks these factors while attributing complex events to climate change by default, as catalogued in its Africa-related reporting and extreme-weather analyses accessible via Climate Realism’s search on floods and Climate Realism’s coverage of drought claims.
Even within the article’s narrative, local management issues loom large. Mutasa notes that dam releases in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province sent additional water downstream into Mozambique—an operational decision with immediate hydrological consequences that has nothing to do with global temperature or climate change.
Treating such factors as footnotes while elevating climate change as the primary driver of flooding misinforms readers about where real risk reduction lies.
Serious climate reporting distinguishes between events and trends, and between personal experiences and measured evidence.
By presenting interviews and moment-in-time scenes as confirmation of a continent-wide climate verdict, Al Jazeera is misleading its audience by making a causal connection where data show none.
Africa’s vulnerability to climate and weather extremes is real, but the causes are multifaceted and long-standing. Ignoring historical precedents and measured trends in favor of an alarming narrative certainty does not inform the public; it misleads it with false headlines.
Top image: A seasonal riverbed in Africa during a dry period, a recurring feature of the region’s climate variability. Limpopo Commission
Read more at Climate Realism
Since 99% of the news we get is false no one should ever have to bother with those leftists Journalists from the NYT’s WP as well as the Talking Heads from NBC,ABC & CBS and CNN the Leader of the pack
Those who ignore history are guaranteed to repeat it. I know this isn’t the perfect quote for those who claim current weather events are caused by human-triggered global warming, er climate change ignore how any specific weather events are not historic but seen over and over again in history. Although records from the Middle Ages or even Roman times are not accurate like today they give indications of what the climate was like over decades and even centuries. But just look back over the last few centuries where there are reasonable records in Europe and eastern North America and there’s no indication that today’s weather events are somehow new and unprecedented.