Guest Post by Thomas J. Shepstone, originally posted at the ‘Energy Security and Freedom’ Substack.
A little over a year ago, a study titled “Warming Accelerates Global Drought Severity” was published in Nature, a climate-consumed journal that has lost all credibility among serious folks. The authors included multiple academics from the University of Oxford in the UK, an elitist institution if there ever was one.
The abstract of the study said this (emphasis and paragraphing added):
Drought is one of the most common and complex natural hazards affecting the environment, economies and populations globally. However, there are significant uncertainties in global drought trends, and a limited understanding of the extent to which a key driver, atmospheric evaporative demand (AED), impacts the recent evolution of the magnitude, frequency, duration and areal extent of droughts.
Here, by developing an ensemble of high-resolution global drought datasets for 1901–2022, we find an increasing trend in drought severity worldwide. Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally.
Not only are typically dry regions becoming drier, but also wet areas are experiencing drying trends.
During the past 5 years (2018–2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981–2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase. The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED. Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.
The study also produced numerous headlines in popular media such as these:
- The New York Times (4 June 2025): “Higher Temperatures and a Thirsty World.”
- The Guardian (3 July 2025): “Weatherwatch: how ‘thirstier’ atmosphere is making droughts more severe.”
- ScienceAlert: “Our Atmosphere’s Growing Thirst Is a Hidden Cause of Worsening Droughts.”
Lead author Solomon Gebrechorkos wrote that atmospheric thirst caused ~40% - Earth.com:
- “How a thirsty atmosphere is making global droughts much worse.”
- Later follow-up: “Earth has become a planet where the air is always thirsty, and that’s quickly drying out the land.”
- Oxford / UC Santa Barbara / Cardiff University press releases (widely picked up): “Earth’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains” and “The atmosphere’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains.”
These used the same 40% figure and an “invisible sponge” metaphor. - Climate Central (October 2025): “Warmer, Thirstier Air Worsens Drought.”
Now, the whole thing has been retracted. Here’s that story, translated from the German publication Science Files:
Drought Catastrophe Cancelled: The Next Climate Change Junk Paper Has Been Retracted
By Michael Klein
September 16, 2026
Because the climate is changing, the atmosphere drinks more [perhaps out of frustration]; because the atmosphere drinks more, it becomes drier on Earth… Most of the authors from the not fully named “author pack” make their living at the University of Oxford, and they all announced the apocalypse by drying out in 2025: Since 1981, they calculated, droughts on Earth have become more severe and more intense;
- An increased “thirst” of the atmosphere made droughts from 2018 to 2022 40% more severe than in the 37 years before that.
- Comparing the two periods: 5 years since 2018 versus 37 years since 1981, the area affected by drought has become 74% larger, 58% of that due to an increased “thirst of the atmosphere.”
- Since 2022, 30% of the Earth’s land surface has been affected by moderate to extreme drought;
- With further climate change, all of this will become much worse.
These are the results that Gebrechorkos and his co-authors spread via the mainstream media, and these are the results that are all wrong.
The authors miscalculated, mixed up data, weighted them incorrectly, compared apples at the equator with dry ice in the Arctic. The comparison periods on which all the results that made it into the media are based are incorrectly coded, so data were assigned incorrectly…
The fact that the junk study has been withdrawn does not change the fact that the articles in the mainstream media, such as the one from ZEIT that we presented above, are still there, have not been provided with any correction, and even if they had been provided with a correction, it would remain largely without effect, because contributions like that of Gebrechorkos et al. (2025) are, in my view, only written in order to be distributed by the media and to hype up the climate apocalypse.
This is not a claim made off the cuff, but one that can be demonstrated from the original contribution by Gebrechorkos et al. (2025), a contribution that was designed in such a way that the “dryness” of the Earth and its soils estimated at the end — a largely arbitrary value, the result of an absurd calculation — is maximized.
This is why the entire climate movement is collapsing. It’s all built on hype by those with special interests in perpetuating a grift, in this case, a pursuit of academic praise and, no doubt, research money put up by other grifters.
