Wrong, Associated Press, Climate Change is not Triggering More Extreme Weather

The Associated Press (AP) recently published an article, titled “From Deluges To Drought, Climate Change Speeds Up Water Cycle, Triggers More Extreme Weather.” The article is false. Evidence clearly indicates that no changes in extreme weather trends are found in the data and, as such, no changes can be tied to climate change.

“Scientists have warned for decades that rising global temperatures would juice the water cycle, leading to more intense storms, worse droughts, and more chaotic shifts between the two,” says the AP’s article. This tired trope assumes climate change drives individual weather events, a point factually refuted repeatedly in rebuttals at Climate Realism.

Examining actual data blows down the AP’s extreme weather “juicing” fantasy faster than a house of cards in a windstorm.

Let’s start with floods. For example, the Climate Realism piece “No, Reuters, Climate Change Is Not Increasing the Impact of Floods”, cites NOAA’s historical flood records to prove these events have ebbed and flowed naturally for centuries—long before SUVs roamed the earth.

Then there’s drought: Climate at a Glance: Drought  lays out the U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index, showing no long-term trend toward worsening conditions over the past 120 years, despite rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, often the go-to for climate alarmists, even admits low confidence in linking extreme weather shifts to human CO2 emissions—a nuance the Seattle Times, which carried the AP’s story, conveniently skips.

But it doesn’t stop there. The AP’s obsession with a “juiced” water cycle glosses over natural climate drivers like El Niño and La Niña, which have dictated weather swings for millennia.

Strong evidence for this comes from the study “Variability of El Niño/Southern Oscillation activity at millennial timescales during the Holocene epoch”, published in Nature. This research analyzed a 10,000-year sediment record to reconstruct variability over the Holocene (the last ~11,700 years). The study found that El Niño and La Niña (ENSO) events—marked by changes in precipitation and sediment deposition—have occurred for at least 10,000 years, with their frequency and intensity fluctuating naturally over decades, centuries, and millennia.

“ENSO variability has been a persistent feature of the tropical Pacific climate system throughout the Holocene,” state the authors of the study. They link these cycles to significant weather swings, such as flips from wetter to drier conditions.

The Seattle Times uncritically republished the AP article. What about the Pacific Northwest’s wet-to-dry cycles affecting Seattle? Historical records—detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011, titled “Drought variability in the Pacific Northwest from a 6,000-yr lake sediment record,” analyzed a sediment core from Castor Lake in Washington to reconstruct 6,000 years of deluge/drought history in the Pacific Northwest. It found that wet and dry cycles have fluctuated naturally over millennia, with some dry periods lasting decades, driven largely by natural climate patterns like El Niño/La Niña.

Getting back to the AP’s article, it also claims:

Oceans absorb most of the planet’s extra heat. That causes the water to expand and ice to melt at the poles, raising sea levels. The warmer water also provides fuel for larger hurricanes and cyclones that can dump massive amounts of water in a short time.

Those claims are easily refuted. Data presented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes  demonstrates definitively that global cyclone activity has remained stable, with no climate change fingerprint to be found. Also, Sea levels have been naturally and gradually rising long before “climate change” was ever a twinkle in the eye of the media.

Other data reveal that wilder swings in extreme weather occurred during the early 20th century, and before, like during the 1930s Dust Bowl, when CO2 levels much lower than at present. Floods in the past, like the devastating 1911 Green River Valley inundation, or the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, dwarf many modern events, yet we’re supposed to believe this is all new? The AP also ignores inconvenient truths, like how improved infrastructure, better forecasting, and improved warning systems have reduced weather-related deaths by more than 90 percent over the last century. A 2021 World Health Organization report confirms deaths from extreme weather have declined dramatically.

“Thanks to improved early warnings and disaster management, the number of deaths decreased almost three-fold,” reported the WMO.

Above the AP’s article, next to a donate button, is the statement: “AP SETS THE STANDARD FOR POLITICAL REPORTING. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT, FACT-BASED JOURNALISM.”

Yet the evidence is clear that while the AP is hyping claims of a ‘juiced” water cycle based on unsubstantiated, vague experts claims, the agency ignored government studies and peer reviewed reports that undermine such a conclusion. For example. NASA’s Global Precipitation Climatology Project, examined global precipitation trends and determined that current variability is well within historical norm; no water cycle juicing is in evidence. Also, Climate Realism has published dozens of articles citing real-world data which demonstrate that neither wildfire nor hurricane nor tornado trends are worsening at all, much less worsening in response to purported climate change, here, here, and here, for example.

“Fact based?” Hardly, since the agency routinely, as its “reporters” did in this story, ignores mountains of easily found data that undermine claims the world faces a climate crisis. Shame on the Associated Press for this journalistic malpractice.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to inform, not indoctrinate. In this story, the AP gets an “F” for false reporting.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.