2012 was the year that global warming came roaring back - in science media, anyway. Despite the IPCC asking the media to help a little less when it came to attributing every weather event to climate change, science media insisted global warming created a 'superstorm' named Sandy and that global warming had finally hit the American Mid-West, after peskily not rising in temperatures since the 1930s.
Actual science disagrees so it will get a lot less media attention. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Drought Task Force places the blame for the extreme drought that crippled the central Great Plains on natural variations in weather patterns. Two key meteorological processes - very little rain in May and June due to low pressure systems that brought storms instead going northward into Canada and thunderstorms were infrequent in July and August and produced little precipitation.
“Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event,” said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at NOAA, who will invariably be dumped on by media types who need hysteria to generate pageviews.
Climate change is a problem that is not going away, plenty of evidence shows that, but hyping up every event as being due to global warming sows distrust among the public - and not just about climate science, about all science. If people can't trust the media on climate change, why trust the media on vaccines or food or energy science?
Study Reveals Global Warming Not To Blame For Last Year’s Crippling Drought - CBS News
