This spring, heavy rains flooded the Mid Mississippi Valley, triggering headlines from CBS News alerters: “Climate change makes floods worse.” [emphasis, links added]
Mainstream media tilted in a sensational, unvisited attribution report by World Weather Attribution (WWA).
However, peer-reviewed science directly contradicts these claims.
The researchers clearly point out that in the powerful analysis published in the Journal of Hydraulics (Wiel et al., 2018): “There is no statistically significant projected trend in the occurrence of floods in 100 years…” For the lower Mississippi Valley.
And Wiel et al. The project has added heavy rainfall events. The sensational headlines conveniently overlook the key difference between rainfall and actual flooding.
As I have shown in previous articles, is it a debunking heat wave mortality or a sensational hurricane report, The media distorts reality with fear-driven narratives, misleads the public and pushes expensive, invalid and ultimately irrational policy agendas.
The latest climate panic in the media: flood narrative
CBS News reported that the latest WWA report clearly shows that climate change is exacerbating floods in the Midwest and South.
The headlines screamed urgency, using each rain as evidence of impending doom. However, as usual, context and rigorous scientific review are obvious.
These media flourished in cherry picking statistics, exaggerated claims and dramatic visual effects, fueling public anxiety while ignoring the historical flood data and significant scientific uncertainty detailed in actual WWA research.
Selective Science: What the Media Won't Tell You
Like my previous criticism of scientific progressive mortality research, the media deliberately omitted the key context in the WWA report.
The study itself acknowledges the huge differences between climate models used to attribute recent flood events to human-induced climate change. In fact, it explicitly states:
“These estimates are smaller than the observed trends due to the wide variation between climate model results. Although some models show similar or large increases to the observed trends, others show weaker or displayed trends. Even lowered the trend.“
Why don’t these key warnings make headlines?
Forgotten Floods: Historical Background Is Important
Historical records show that before current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, severe flooding occurred frequently in the Mississippi Valley.
For example, the Great Mississippi Flood in 1927 was displaced, hundreds of thousands of acres.
Recently, floods in 1993 and 2019 destroyed blockbusters in the Midwest. Neither of these events is reasonably attributed to modern climate change.
However, the media conveniently overlooked these historic floods to strengthen their alarm claims. This is not science… Building narrative is selective storytelling.
Behind the Scenes: WWA's Pseudoscientific Methodology
I previously detailed the flawed approach to the World Weather Attribution Program in my article “Critical Examination of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) Initiative.”
They rely on oversimplified climate models, under-treatment of natural variability, and acknowledge that uncertainty makes their claim to the human impact highly speculative.
Irrational Fear is written by climatologist Dr. Matthew Wielicki and has been supported by readers. If you value what you read here, consider subscribing to and supporting the work there.
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