Rebecca Hersher recently produced an article for National Public Radio (NPR), titled “Climate change is making the weather more severe. Why don’t most forecasts mention it?”
The article is just one more example of journalists acting as climatologists, making false claims based on other media reports rather than the actual known science. [emphasis, links added]
Many of the assertions Hersher makes in her article are demonstrably false. In addition, there is no evident benefit to adding a false climate connection to National Weather Service (NWS) reports, forecasts, and warnings.
Real-world data refutes Hersher’s false claim that climate change is making the weather more severe.
Climate science acknowledges that weather and climate operate on vastly different time scales, 30 years versus hours to days. By contrast and contrary to fact, the profession of journalism seems to really believe the climate is equivalent to weather.
One of the most common severe weather claims is that hurricanes are getting worse and more frequent due to climate change.
Three lines of evidence: tropical storm accumulated energy, frequency, and research (see table 1 below) show this claim is false. Data show hurricanes have neither increased numbers nor intensity during the recent period of modest warming.
Same for tornadoes, there’s no increase. The list of extreme weather that has NOT increased due to the supposed influence of climate change is quite large and well-documented.
For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report, Chapter 11, Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate, provides conclusions, summarized in Figure 1, illustrating the fact that changes in the number and intensity of severe weather events have not been detected, nor can any changes be attributed to human-caused climate change:
Clearly from the data and the research, no evidence exists that any specific weather event is directly driven (or enhanced) by so-called man-made climate change from increased carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.
The IPCC’s summary of the state of global climate science makes no such attribution. You’d think journalists could embrace this rather than writing falsehoods based on a belief system.
Regarding the second point Hersher makes in her headline: Why don’t most forecasts mention it?
It is really simple – it is not part of the mission statement of the NWS:
NWS Mission
Provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts, warnings, and impact-based decision support services for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy.
Their mission is to provide climate data, but not climate forecasts, which is impossible. The NWS’s mission is to provide actionable weather-centric data on short timescales, not trying to predict a region’s general climate 30 years into the future.
Even if the NWS did provide some sort of climate component, what value would it offer to the public?
For example, what if a future NWS tornado warning looked like this:
The National Weather Service in Dallas Texas has issued a climate-enhanced Tornado Warning for Dallas and Tarrant counties, including the cities of Dallas, Irving, Arlington, and Garland, until 3 PM CST.
Adding “climate” to the warning does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t provide any new information, nor does it provide any gauge of intensity, severity, or time.
All it does is add a useless nod to the climate narrative to assuage people like Hersher who wrongly believe there is some link between climate and tornadoes when the data and the research indicate no such link exists.
When people are facing a natural disaster like a tornado, they need immediate and useful information which will help them survive, not useless, irrelevant, and false labels hinting that humans are somehow at fault for a particular storm.
Hersher simply didn’t do her job as a journalist. She chose to promote a connection to between supposed human-caused climate change and weather events when none exists.
In the process, she ignored relevant facts that demonstrate no increasing trend in extreme weather.
She chose advocacy over truthful reporting, a shameful breach of journalistic professionalism.
Read more at Climate Realism
Their still funding this leftists propaganda?
I have closely followed the climate change fraud for twenty years. Earlier this century there was a pause in warming. A lawyer with no integrity might argue that such a pause didn’t exist, but the climate alarmists confirm its existence by coming up with 64 excuses as to why it was happening. This pause created a crisis for the movement. So many agendas were hitchhiking on the climate change movement. This included transferring wealth from the industrial nations to the developing nations, create new taxes and increase existing ones, increase the size of government, force a decline in the middle class standard of living, and force people out of their cars. These agendas couldn’t make it on their own merit. Some means had to be found to keep the global warming movement going.
The solution was to, without supporting data, claim that extreme weather events had become more common and severe. Such events had always caused a great deal of damage so was perfect to justify the draconian action that the climateers wanted. However, just as in the case of temperature, trends the real data does not support the leftist cause. This is shown by the data from the IPCC AR6 report. It is also revealing that even though the scientific body of the IPCC shows no increase in extreme weather events, their politicians often cite severe weather as justification for drastic action.
NPR Nazis Propaganda Radio