The New York Times engages in some classic yellow journalism with “Climate: Disaster Survivors Sticking Together” teasing to a column by David Gelles that starts “Extreme weather is hitting more people with each passing year.” But it’s not, even though there are more people for it to hit with each passing year as the climate crisis coincides strangely with unprecedented human material flourishing and a 99 percent drop in climate-related fatalities. We accept that there is room for intelligent and well-meaning debate about facts as well as their meaning. But the drumbeat of assertions by climate fanatics that the weather is getting worse when it’s just not crosses the line into bad-faith bellowing ignorance.

Another Times story titillates with a “CALCULATOR” of:

“Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.”

What exactly “climate risk” is, unless they mean bad weather, is not explained. Why the Times thinks bad weather is new is also not explained. What the Times thinks of the fact that even as global population soars, the number of people killed every year by bad weather has plummeted, not the proportion but the absolute number, is apparently nothing. Instead they lead off:

“When it comes to the effects of hostile climates – flood, fire and more – what matters isn’t just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.”

Well, duh. And clearly wealthier societies are far better able to withstand that risk, so even if you believe that fossil fuels make the weather a bit worse, the tradeoff is well worth making. But so is the effort to see if the weather is getting worse.

Now we don’t deny that “fire” is a hostile climate. But if it’s an “effect” of hostile climate, then the climate has always been hostile since what evidence we have says there were a lot more wildfires two and three hundred years ago than there are now. Don’t wait for them to credit CO2 with the decrease though… since they didn’t bother looking it up.

That story also blathers about how things from “early warning systems” to “governance” can “significantly mitigate the effects of climate change” although climate change is not a causal force it’s a statistical description of how the weather has altered in some place over at least 30 years. And it says Chicago is the most resilient city with “low hurricane risk” due, we point out, not to them building a big windbreak or something but it not being in the path of the hurricanes that regularly sweep through other parts of the US and have for as long as there have been observers to flee them shouting “Whoa Nelly a twister!” Moreover:

“Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted.”

And if the Times seriously thinks monsoons are a new and horrible consequence of the gasoline-powered automobile you should cancel your subscription before it puts some other nonsense in your head. Like that floods and mudslides in rural Nepal and Tibet are relevant to urban resilience.

Bloomberg Green is also guilty, with:

“How are US water and sewer systems built over a century ago coping with the extreme weather that’s becoming more common with climate change? The short answer: not well.”

To which we retort: How are US media outlets built over a century ago coping with improved opportunities for research? The short answer: not well. For instance their prime example is:

“This July, in the middle of the night during one of Southern California’s 2026 heat waves, a 36-inch utility pipe gave way beneath West Hollywood, sending 17 million gallons of water coursing past the nightclubs of the famed Sunset Strip and opening up a massive sinkhole that flooded nearby homes and garages.”

Which isn’t good, though what a heat wave had to do with it is unclear. As the story then gushed:

“There were at least five other significant water system leaks around Los Angeles that week, a spate of failures that brought scrutiny of the system’s advanced age. The Sunset water main that ruptured had been installed in 1916.”

So there’s your problem. Trendy governments spending all their money buying votes and chasing worthless trendy policies like solar energy instead of redoing the sewers once every, say, 100 years, then saying the climate busted the rusting remains of one installed before the US entered World War I. And it gets worse. The journalism, we mean, as well as the governance:

“Meanwhile, municipal water systems in at least a dozen US states, including Minnesota, Michigan and Georgia, reported a very different threat that month. They were targeted in cyberattacks – believed to be the work of Iranian hackers – that disrupted service in several cities, triggering boil-water advisories and fears of more malicious actions.”

Goodness gracious. Climate change causes Iranian hackers? Or just ridiculous headlines and worse copy? No but see:

“‘Climate problems make every other problem in the water sector worse,’ said Scott Berry, senior advisor on policy and external affairs for the US Water Alliance.”

So without his list of “[d]roughts, storms, flooding, heat waves” you could just rely on pipes laid under Woodrow Wilson and the benevolence of Islamists? But since we invented storms in 1988 you can’t?

So they think, it seems. Thus back in August NBC blared:

“Drought, heat, fire, floods: In Utah, climate disasters just keep compounding/ Utah has come to exemplify climate change’s snowballing effects.”

Or it’s just a place with weather. But weather is a difficult concept, and looking it up harder still. So back in July Climate Home News bellowed:

“‘The climate alarm is blaring from every direction,’ UN Climate Change head Simon Stiell said this week, citing wildfires in Europe, storms in Chile and heatwaves in North Africa and Japan. The destruction is undeniable and unignorable. But what’s often left unsaid – by the media, politicians and ordinary people – is the link running from that destruction to the biggest culprit of climate change: fossil fuels.”

Often left unsaid? It seems incredible that they didn’t even look up whether the media and politicians yammer endlessly about it. But even more incredible that they didn’t look up whether people in Chile don’t have a word for “storms” because they never had them before. Or, again, look up one of many readily available sources, including yes the IPCC, to see whether reliable data indicate a trend.

Who needs to, though, when you can just make stuff up? Back in June Heatmap wrote:

“Californians: Brace Yourselves for a Hurricane This Summer/ An active Pacific cyclone season plus El Niño-warmed waters could produce a first-of-its-kind West Coast storm.”

Yeah. Unless it doesn’t. In which case you know what they’ll say. Nothing.

As you notice, our files bulge with examples of this kind of journalism based on things that didn’t happen or might have been going to instead of, you know, stuff that did. We have a thing about evidence. But increasingly they don’t. If Phys.org bewails “Two back-to-back droughts in 2023 and 2024” (and we won’t ask what other kind of drought you could have in consecutive years), you can bet they’ll say:

“The rainforest is one of the planet’s largest carbon stores. However, due to climate change, this vital planetary system is under intense pressure, particularly from increasingly frequent and more severe droughts.”

And you can bet they will not look back any great distance to see whether it’s real. Yes, some study thinks it’s the worst since 1992. And technically it gets us into a 30-year frame since 1992 was 34 years ago now. But what you need to chalk up another hit by “climate change” is that the 30 years from 1997 through 2026 are demonstrably dryer than 1967 through 1996.

If you actually Google, you find for instance this note in a “Timeline of Amazon history”:

“1850–1915 – Rubber boom sucks tens of thousands of immigrants into the Amazon, mostly from the drought-stricken northeastern region of Brazil (the Northeast Region didn’t include Bahia or Sergipe back then).”

Drought-stricken northeastern Brazil over 65 years? Oh Joe. Say it ain’t so. But it is, along with:

“2005 – Worst drought in 50 years hits the western Amazon Basin.”

So they had a worse one 50 years earlier? Um yes. And part of a decade-long dry period. You see, from a 2004 paper when you could still say such stuff:

“Here, we present new satellite observations on tropical rainfall distribution and historical river flow observations to document a natural see-saw oscillation across the Atlantic Ocean: floods over the Amazon basin tend to coincide with droughts over the Congo basin and vice versa. This phenomenon is most significant during the southern hemisphere summer, and was observed most clearly during the decades of 1945–1955, 1960s, and 1970s.”

Why, you could even mention “natural variability of floods and droughts over the Amazon and the Congo basins” which wouldn’t get that cherished “APPROVED” on a grant application today. Incredibly, that paper does not contain the words “climate change” or “global warming”. Indeed it doesn’t contain “warming”. But its data clearly show that neither floods nor droughts in either place are new. And if Congo is dry when Amazonia is wet and vice versa, does the dreaded “climate change” cause floods, droughts or just weather that’s like past weather except not because aaaaaaah! we’re all going to die?

Meanwhile if you’re wondering what Gelles’ proof is, or at least his evidence, it turns out to be a poll. Yup. A poll. Not hard data. Not Roger Pielke Jr.’s dashboard making it easy to look stuff up. You may remember that when the Interwebs first appeared there was a lot of hoohah about how they would enable us to access information and the best that had been said and thought without leaving our couch, and instead we used it to insult complete strangers about politics, watch videos of dandruff and look up pictures of cats that look like Hitler. Alas, such is humanity.

Still, you’d think those paid to inform us would do some research. Instead Gelles writes:

“Thirty-eight percent of Americans say their community has been affected by severe storms, floods or fires in the past year, according to Gallup. So when I set out to write about those whose lives had been upended by extreme weather, I knew it wouldn’t be too hard to turn up examples.”

Or make them up, since he has no evidence, and appears uninterested in having any, on whether that 38% is either accurate self-reporting or different from what you’d have found in, say, 1938. Instead just sob stories about tragedy, resilience and bonding, ending:

“There is grace and humanity and friendship in the stories of how these disparate Americans have come together. But the backdrop to it all is a world of higher temperatures, fiercer storms and more destructive climate-fueled disasters.”

No. The backdrop is irresponsible commentary.