Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire

This is what global warming looks like, opinion pieces quickly declared in both Politico and CNN about devastating Hurricane Harvey. A week later, news media around the globe and politicians were saying the exact same thing about Hurricane Irma.

Jumping the gun on linking disasters to climate change is dangerous. It points us toward policies that will have little to no effect at reducing future devastation. 

The science is clear but also nuanced: Climate change will worsen some extreme weather events, and it will improve others.

The latest alarming news about climate change is that huge swaths of densely inhabited land will be underwater by 2050, with their cities “erased.” These reports – which appeared in The New York Times and many other media outlets – are based on a good research paper by scientists at Climate Central, but they get the story wrong.

This is part of a damaging pattern. Climate change is a man-made problem that we need to tackle, but many of the news stories about its purported effects are scaring us without justification and misleading us about how to act.

CNN'S AMANPOUR A New Look at the Climate Change Debate Aired February 24, 2010 - 15:00:00 ET