The recent article by Samantha Harrington in Yale Climate Connections, “Six photos show how climate change shaped our world in 2025,” presents a photo-driven narrative asserting that wildfires, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts in 2025 were “made more devastating and deadly by climate change.” [emphasis, links added]
This is outright false.
The piece relies on striking images and rapid-attribution claims to imply a climate causation, but offers no hard evidence to support such claims, and measured trends refute such claims.
The article states that these images “show the consequences of our warming climate in action,” and repeatedly asserts that climate change “made” specific events more intense or likely, citing groups such as World Weather Attribution and Climate Central.
The emotional power of the photographs is undeniable. But photographs are snapshots in time; they say nothing about the 30-year trends required to establish climate, nor do they substitute for long-term observational evidence.
More importantly, climate is a statistical construct, an average of weather over 30 years, not a force of nature. Only weather is a force of nature, and weather events are what do the damage in these photos.
A single fire scar, a flooded living room, or a satellite image of storm damage cannot establish a climate trend any more than a single cold snap disproves warming. This basic standard is precisely why meteorological agencies use 30-year normals.
By presenting six isolated events—each framed as “made worse” by climate change—Yale Climate Connections collapses weather into climate and invites readers to infer trends that the evidence does not demonstrate.
When you step away from photos and examine history and measurements, the story becomes far more nuanced.
For hurricanes, long-term records summarized at Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes show no clear upward trend in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or accumulated cyclone energy that would justify claims of steadily worsening storms.
For floods, Climate at a Glance: Floods documents the lack of a consistent global increase in flood frequency or magnitude, a conclusion echoed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
For wildfires, Climate at a Glance: Wildfires explains that fire extent is heavily influenced by land management, ignition sources, and fuel loads, not temperature alone, with long-term trends varying widely by region.
Heat waves and heavy rain events likewise show mixed regional behavior rather than a uniform global escalation, as summarized across the Climate at a Glance Extreme Weather pages.
The article leans heavily on rapid-attribution claims—statements like, climate change made a given event “two to four degrees hotter” or “700 times more likely.”
These claims are derived from models comparing a simulated present world to a simulated counterfactual world without added greenhouse gases. They are not direct measurements.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) makes clear that attribution confidence varies widely by event type and region, and that uncertainties remain substantial. Later references to IPCC AR6 often disappear from media coverage.
Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked World Weather Attribution’s and Climate Central’s attribution claims, showing that factual claims of an impact between climate change and specified extreme weather events can’t be discovered in the data and that the methodology used to make such a connection is flawed; see here, here, here, and here, for example.
Equally important is what the article ignores.
Disasters are driven by exposure and vulnerability as much as by weather. Population growth in floodplains, development in fire-prone landscapes, inadequate drainage, poor forest management, and aging infrastructure all magnify damage.
A flooded Texas home photographed in July reflects zoning decisions, river engineering, or warning systems—or lack thereof—that determine outcomes, not, in this case, a changed climate.
A burned hillside in California is indicative of fuel buildup after decades of fire suppression and inaction to prevent fuel buildup, not worsening drought or heat, neither of which is in evidence.
Here’s the key point: photos can capture damage, but they cannot diagnose causes.
Case in point is a photo from the year 1900:
By looking at it, you can’t determine the cause of that damage. It might be an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, or some other high wind event. It might even be a demolition in progress. You just can’t tell.
Without the context of the event, any attribution of cause is purely speculative. That context is provided here: The History Of Galveston And The 1900 Storm, which was a hurricane believed to be of Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
If the same storm happened today, rest assured that experts and media armed with rapid-response “attribution science” would rush to use those same pictures to assert that climate change was somehow responsible.
Climate Realism has repeatedly documented how photo-centric storytelling and rapid attribution are used to oversell certainty.
Only long-term trends can suggest that climate change is making the weather worse, and photographs can’t capture trends
Readers can see a catalog of critiques of wildfire, flood, hurricane, and heat-wave attribution claims at its coverage of extreme weather, where media assertions are compared against observational records and IPCC findings.
Likewise, Climate Realism’s many analyses of so-called “attribution science” show how model-based probability statements are routinely presented as settled fact, even when underlying data are sparse or contradictory.
Perhaps most telling, the article never asks whether these kinds of images would have been possible in earlier decades. The answer is yes. History is filled with devastating floods, fires, storms, and droughts long before modern CO2 emissions rose.
What has changed most is not the existence of extremes, but the ubiquity of cameras, drones, satellites, and social media—ensuring that every disaster is now documented in high resolution but falsely and instantly framed as evidence of “climate change” by narrative-driven media outlets.
By substituting photographs for trends and models for measurements, Yale Climate Connections misleads readers into believing that six images can “show how climate change shaped our world.” They cannot. Climate is measured over decades, not captured in a frame.
Until media reporting consistently distinguishes weather from climate and imagery from evidence, readers will keep getting a powerful yet false visual narrative.
Only long-term trends can suggest that climate change is making the weather worse, and photographs can’t capture trends.
Read more at Climate Realism
Its just not right to scare people with False threats of Global Warming/Climate Change providing that back in the 1970’s the Big Threat was suppose to be Global Cooling and a New Ice Age was coming the fact tht the very same liberal news rags Time and Newsweek was giving that the Top Coverage back then