Good News Everyone! We hit ‘Peak Climate’ – Media Articles are in Decline
18 hours ago Anthony Watts
I know many of you have been feeling it. I certainly have, especially when I go look for stories to debunk from media outlets that take some press release and massage it so it reads like “turbo doom clickbait.” There’s less of those these days and the data suggests a downward trend.
Our friend, Steve Milloy of junkscience.com posted a very interesting plot on X yesterday. Given the clues he left, I was able to replicate it with Grok. It goes from 1988 (when Dr. James Hansen first testified before Congress about the climate scare,) to the present post-Biden era where Trump is effectively replicating Sherman’s march to the sea in the climate world.
Numbers are approximate and scaled to represent total articles across monitored sources, normalized for consistency across periods (e.g., fewer sources pre-2020 expansion).
The data comes from Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) which tracks media coverage of “climate change” or “global warming” in newspapers, radio, and TV across dozens of sources worldwide, with data starting in 2004 for global monitoring (and 2000 for US-specific). Pre-2004 data comes from earlier studies by MeCCO founder Max Boykoff and colleagues, which analyzed English-language newspapers from 1988 onward. Absolute article counts are not publicly available without accessing their datasets, but trends show low coverage in the late 1980s, spikes around key events (e.g., IPCC reports in 1990, 1995, 2001; Kyoto Protocol in 1997), and overall increases with major peaks in 2007, 2009, 2015, 2019, and especially 2021 (the highest since tracking began).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/30/good-news-everyone-we-hit-peak-climate-media-articles-are-in-decline/
