As 2025 came to a close, the legacy media was topping off its coverage of climate in the preceding 12 months. CBS News reported the year was so hot, “it pushed Earth past the critical climate change mark.” [some emphasis, links added]
ABC News had a “year in review” article recounting stories about wildfires, floods, and extreme heat, and The Guardian reported on a study tallying the costliest disasters of 2025.
“Cyclones and floods in Southeast Asia this autumn killed more than 1,750 people and caused more than $25bn (£19bn) in damage, while the death toll from California wildfires topped 400 people,” The Guardian article states in the opening paragraph.
One story The Guardian and other outlets aren’t reporting is that extreme weather in 2025 claimed the fewest lives in recorded history.
Less Than 1 Per 100,000
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spent 30 years researching the impacts of climate change while he was a professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
On his “The Honest Broker” Substack, Pielke estimates that there were 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people across the globe in 2025.
Climate-related disaster deaths have declined 97.5% over the century (1920-2025)
Richer, smarter, and more resilient societies reduce disaster deaths
This swamps any potential climate signal
Why not reported? Instead, media only delivers climate doomhttps://t.co/jjPohSdBXI pic.twitter.com/duuHn64mpb
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) January 1, 2026
Despite media reports that climate change is bringing death and destruction at every turn, deaths from extreme weather per 100,000 people have been falling rapidly for decades.
There were more than 320 deaths per 100,000 in 1960, and approximately 1.3 deaths per 100,000 in 1990. There have been six years since 2000, Pielke notes, in which deaths per 100,000 population were less than 1, and they all have happened since 2014.
Selling Extremes Aligned With Funding Sources
David Blackmon, author of the “Energy Absurdities” Substack and an analyst with more than 40 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, told Just the News that the drive to generate audiences plays a role in why the legacy media ignore good news when it comes to climate.
“Catastrophe sells better than calm weather,” Blackmon said.
Beyond those incentives, to which all media businesses are susceptible, is the funding directly and indirectly flowing into the legacy media from anti-fossil fuel activist groups, Blackmon said.
Inside Climate News, for example, is funded by numerous climate advocacy groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.
To promote news favorable to its political goals, Inside Climate News has regularly partnered with broadcast networks and newspapers, including NBC News, the Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Five climate points for CBS editor-in-chief @bariweiss: Although the rest of the world is awakening to the climate hoax, CBS is legitimizing young people’s fears of having kids because of the climate.
What the climate news should be:
1. No apocalyptic climate prediction has… https://t.co/65qGjjXwmw
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) December 30, 2025
Last year, CBS News teamed up with the activist publication for an article that was critical of efforts to recycle plastics.
The Associated Press received $8 million from climate advocacy groups in 2022 directly in support of its climate and energy reporting.
These political advocacy groups include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Quadrivium, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which has pledged over $1 billion between 2023 and 2028 to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
The Associated Press discloses this funding at the bottom of articles on climate and energy issues. However, it refers to the groups simply as “philanthropies” without any mention of their pro-green energy agendas.
“Many of these outlets take money from billionaires and their charitable foundations who have created these phony media operations like Inside Climate News to run negative stories about the climate and to try and hide the climate emergency that doesn’t exist.
“And so there’s no financial incentive for these platforms to take all that money to report any of this good news,” Blackmon said.
Media Climate Alchemy
The CBS article reporting that 2025 was the “hottest year ever” cites an analysis by the World Weather Attribution, which helped develop the field of “attribution science” for the purpose of environmental litigation.
The field produces studies immediately following extreme weather events that purport to find that global warming is making the event many times more likely.
6. The Climate Change Hoax
🔹 Climate change isn’t a crisis —it’s a business model. The narrative has been weaponized to push carbon credits, green taxes, and endless “solutions” that enrich the few and burden the many.
🔹 Behind every doomsday headline is an economic or… pic.twitter.com/xTL1XdWynt
— HarmonyHaven (@HarmonyHaven_1) July 6, 2025
The World Weather Attribution was founded to help climate activists win lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.
Its co-founder, climatologist Friederike Otto, told Politico in 2019:
“Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
Otto explained in a Concordia University interview last year that this field of science is part of a legal strategy to arm plaintiffs in lawsuits against oil companies with a scientific basis for their complaints.
Pielke has criticized its methods and compared its conclusions to the ancient pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy. The organization’s research gets extensive media coverage, but rarely do the reports include critics of its conclusions.
Read rest at Just The News
It’s an embarrassment to actual science that anyone trained in climatology, which is supposedly the study of climate (i.e., the nature and history of climate), can pervert such study into pseudoscience in support of lawfare, as Friederike Otto has done.