Media Outlets Continue Spreading False Amazon “Record Drought” Claims
By
Anthony Watts
February 2, 2024
Last week my colleague Linnea Lueken published a detailed rebuttal to a story in the New York Times claiming a recent drought in the Amazon was caused by climate change, saying:
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.
This week, additional media outlets picked up the story and made the same mistakes that the BBC and New York Times had made. Al Jazeera claimed Global warming drove record Amazon rainforest drought, study finds, while the Associated Press opined Global warming was primary cause of unprecedented Amazon drought, study finds.
Each of these news outlets ignored or at a minimum displayed ignorance of the fact that an even worse drought occurred in 1865, well before climate change was even an issue.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/02/multiple-media-outlets-ignore-history-spread-false-amazon-record-drought-claims/
