A recent PBS News report, “Farmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable,” claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.
PBS reports:
“More than half of the continental U.S. is facing drought conditions. But other parts of the country are facing the opposite problem. Extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops at a time when they’re already facing high production costs. Paul Solman recently traveled to southern Georgia to hear from some of those farmers. “
Extreme weather being different, and even alternating, in different parts of the country is not unusual or new. The “weather whiplash” phenomena is an artifact of news coverage, not a real thing. Flooding often follows after a period of drought dries and hardens or compacts the soil, preventing water from soaking into the soil as a result making runoff more severe. This is a known, natural feature of recovery from drought that PBS vaguely admits later in the coverage.
The state that PBS focuses on in the piece is Georgia. Their reporter, Paul Solman, interviews farmers who supposedly lived on their land for generations, and each of them insists that this year’s drought conditions are unprecedented.
In answer to Solman’s question about whether one farmer has ever experienced drought like this year’s before, the farmer said that he hadn’t in his entire lifetime, and that he “never heard of stories of a drought this bad either.”
Another farmer says her crops suffered when rain finally came, and asserts that “we’re seeing wetter wets and drier dries.”
A climate scientist is interviewed next, who asserts that “[c]limate change is making these [droughts and deluge cycles] more frequent,” making it harder for farmers to predict when to plant crops.
Data disagree with both farmers as well as the climate scientist.
Drought data from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental information show that not only is the current drought in Georgia not unprecedented, but major prolonged droughts that were even more severe have occurred in the state several times in just the past few decades, as well as much longer ago. Drought conditions in 2011-2012 and the mid-1950s were worse than today. The most severe drought occurred in 1925, more than 100 years of global warming ago, when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were lower. (See figure below).
Data show the particular county that the first and second farmers interviewed by PBS are from, Long County, saw a bad drought as recently as the summer of 2012, when the entire county suffered D3 “extreme drought” conditions. The 2010-2012 drought was far more severe than this one and lasted longer. Other worse and more prolonged droughts occurred in 2007, 2002, 1990, 1981, 1954, and further back, with the worst sustained drought occurring in the 1930s. (See figure below)
The figure above also shows the periods of wet conditions. It is clear that there are many years going back to 1900 that saw even more severe swings to overabundance of rain.
Data show no long term trend towards an increase in extreme short-term precipitation events in Georgia, either. (See figure below).
One should not blame the farmers for feeling like this year was particularly bad for drought in Georgia. The news, for one, has been claiming as much, as discussed in the post “Sorry, Los Angeles Times, Climate Change Isn’t Driving Georgia’s Wildfires,” where the media were trying to blame some wildfires this summer on the same conditions, falsely linked to climate trends. Human beings are pretty bad at recalling the full context of past years’ weather conditions off the top of their heads, we often tend to feel that nothing was ever worse than what we are currently experiencing, unless the difference was really stark.
The PBS “journalists” should be ashamed of the slant of this coverage. They offered no pushback whatsoever on the suggestion that Georgia’s drought was unprecedented or part of a pattern of worsening drought, which it is not. The data are publicly available and easily found for any intrepid reporter to discover. It seems that PBS was far more interested in using a tough year for farmers as part of a larger climate alarmist narrative push, than actually digging into the truth.
Noble Cause Corruption in action.
As with near all journalists, the PBS journalist goal is not to inform, it is to inflame. “If it bleeds it leads” is the common goal. A sad state of affairs in the “profession,” but that is what we now have.
PBS :
Push BS .
Except real BS is useful as fertilizer .
PBS: National Politburo Radio.
Pure Bull S*%t!
Yes – on the climate issue, PBS could just as well be labeled the “Propaganda Broadcasting Service” — I have a continually running count of the sheer bias of the climate issue, please see: “NewsHour Global Warming Bias Tally, Updated 5/5/26: 137 to 0.” Meaning zero skeptic climate scientist equal in caliber to their 137 IPCC- / NASA- / NOAA-associated scientist guests who’ve been allowed to speak without any opposition on the program ever since 1996. This particular discussion segment hosted by Paul Solman was the 1,805th in which the climate issue was directly discussed or mentioned on the program in a significant way, going all the way back to the beginning of their online broadcast transcripts. Among all of those, only seven instances contained any semblance of information about the skeptic side of the issue, such that their viewing audience might be prompted to wonder if there is perhaps a side of the issue they haven’t heard about.
I’ve lost count of the headlines proclaiming that late May and June, and perhaps even July 2026, are historically unprecedented in every respect—a claim I have no objection to in principle, setting aside the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, which influences otherwise valid thermometers and tends to bias averages upward. If a station affected by a 2°C bias records 41°C during an unusual period instead of 39°C, that may well matter, especially when, for some people, “every tenth of a degree counts” (but only when it comes to arguing for the dismantling of industrial society).
We are also well aware of catastrophic episodes documented, for example, by the field of historical climatology. In particular, the drought and heatwave of the sixteenth century (that hell lasted eleven months), along with others whose exact dates I no longer recall, but which were recorded in European archives. One important point should be kept in mind: only the most remarkable events were documented. It is entirely possible that unusually hot weather occurred at highly atypical times without causing enough damage to crops, livestock, or human populations to be considered worth recording.
The increasing density of the measurement network also matters: more weather stations naturally mean more observations; more stations combined with greater urbanization mean more measurements affected by the UHI effect.
I would like to repeat a question I asked a few days ago in the comments on another article: can the onset of an El Niño event promote atmospheric blocking patterns?
Many thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to answer.
And have a great day, everyone.
A warm blob of water in the Pacific will change wind patterns over the Pacific.
Changed wind patterns over the Pacific will change wind patterns over the rest of the world.
I don’t believe we understand weather well enough to answer a specific question regarding what kind of changes an El Nino can create.
Having observed a number of El Ninos and La Ninas over the past few decades, we can make guesses regarding statistical probabilities of weather events happening.
Thank you very much !
I used to listen to NPR all the time. Then I started catching stories where they only told about half the story. I quit listening after I noticed I’d started talking back to the radio a bit too much.
Lying by omission is actually 80% of all propaganda.
Imagine they’d tell the people that China alone had a famine(almost always result of floods and droughts ) almost every year in the 2000 years prior to the 20th century( because climate was so perfect back then at 300 ppm co2 levels).
We can only Imagine how bad it was in the rest of the world.
But nowadays a drought here and a degree more there
are called a catastrophy.
According to the alarmists, the weather was perfect prior to 1950 or so.
“Climate change makes weather less predictable”
Journalistic garbage: An untested and emotionally imbued assertion that travels all the way around the world while the facts are putting their shoes on.
Exactly when has weather been “predictable”?
When a geographic area the size of Georgia is in drought, and then it is blamed on “global” climate change, how would only a small area of the earth be affected by a global phenomena? That question has always befuddled me.
Yes there are hundreds if not thousands of local climates around the world.
All doing their own thing as the influences dictate in coupled non-linear chaotic systems.
Averaging their numerous metrics to construct one “global average” is abject nonsense.
You should checkout the Köppen climate classification system at Wikipedia. There is a small table of parameters used in this system.
Yes thanks Harold. I’ve looked at it numerous times.
I think that the relatively coarse classifications & common groupings of climates around the world (N ~ 31?) doesn’t provide nearly enough granularity for behavioral differentiation conclusions, and resultant individuality appreciation.
I’ve lived in places around the world where their physical influences on their weather / climate are distinctly, predictably, observably different from localities less than ~ 100 kms away.
Some differences in influences are easily attributable to major atmospheric cycles etc, but topography, proximity to bodies of water, forestation, etc. etc. play a local part that accounts for major behavioral differences.
This is basic stuff, but then averaging the discernable recordable metrics of each distinct climate locality / district with different localities’ climates metrics and calling this resultant construct the global climate behavior of Earth is in my opinion, a farce of no practical use, that misleads our decision-making about adaptation measures to ever-chaotic climates.
Go to library and check out modern text books on meteorology. In Essentials of Meteorology by C. Donald Aherns there is large two page spread in 14 colors of the system. The pages are large: 21 cm x 27 cm.
Proper journalists are becoming rare. The others are either gossip mongers or storytellers.
PBS must be joining forces with Canada’s CBC which last summer almost guaranteed that semi-drought conditions on the Prairie provinces during the past several years were the prelude to another Dust Bowl era. Except just as that period ran its course by the late 1930s, near-record rainfall during past month has caused widespread flooding in many areas from southern Manitoba to the Rockies. So once again we see an example of the so-called climate gurus proving they really don’t know any more than the laymen about future weather patterns, and that’s why those “experts” are given so little credence.