Wrong, New York Times and BBC, A New Study Doesn’t Prove Climate Change Is Causing the Amazon’s Drought
By
Linnea Lueken
January 25, 2024
Several mainstream news sources, including The New York Times (NYT) and BBC, claim that a new study shows that recent severe drought conditions in the Amazon rainforest were “fueled” or driven by climate change. The stories are false on two fronts. First, the study in question merely says the drought was made more likely due to climate change, but more pressing, the study does not get into a detailed analysis of the causes of the drought, and real-world data show that severe drought is not becoming more common in the Amazon.
The study is another in a growing number of rapid attribution studies from a group called World Weather Attribution Initiative (WWAI) that finger climate change as the primary driver of extreme weather events. As with past “studies” produced by WWAI, the mainstream media is only too happy to once again promote and even exaggerate what the study claims.
Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and weather researcher, pointed out that the media reporting on this latest attribution study is wildly inconsistent, with some articles like one from the NYT admitting that severe drought still would have occurred even if there was no anthropogenic (human-caused) warming; the BBC explaining that El Niño conditions are a contributing factor, and Financial Times saying that El Niño is NOT a major influence. Maue goes on to say that the most accurate reporting about the study was done by Axios, which reported that El Niño and climate change reduced rainfall by “about the same amount” and “while the El Niño worsened the drought, higher temperatures were the catalyst, and also vaulted it to more severe levels[.]”
https://climaterealism.com/2024/01/wrong-new-york-times-and-bbc-a-new-study-doesnt-prove-climate-change-is-causing-the-amazons-drought/
