WRONG, Chicago Tribune, Climate Change Isn’t Making Hailstorms Worse
By
Linnea Lueken
March 17, 2026
The Chicago Tribune recently ran a story claiming that climate change is making storms in Illinois “more severe,” particularly with regard to hail and tornadoes. This is false. There is no evidence that hail is becoming larger or tornadoes more powerful, or that either has become more common. The article relies entirely on computer model projections that it presents as fact, without reference to real world data. The article suggests that higher insurance claims are evidence that storms are more destructive, but this isn’t actually evidence of anything other than increased property values.
The article, titled “Gargantuan hail, destructive tornadoes: Climate change making Illinois storms more severe,” claims that as warming continues to raise average global temperatures, “hailstones larger than ping-pong or golf balls will become more frequent […] according to a study led by Gensini and published a couple of years ago in the scientific journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.”
The study is a few years old, but it comes up almost every time the media wants to tie a notable hail event to climate change. It is not based on real world observations, but on projections from computer modelling that assumes that global warming will result in more storms with stronger updrafts, which would allow for larger hailstorm formation before they drop to earth. This same assumption was behind an NBC News report from July 2025, which was refuted in Climate Realism by meteorologist Anthony Watts.
In that post, Watts points out:
https://climaterealism.com/2026/03/wrong-chicago-tribune-climate-change-isnt-making-hailstorms-worse/
