The New York Times’ Big Lie About the Atmosphere Being ‘Thirstier ‘
By
Anthony Watts
June 6, 2025
The New York Times (NYT) claims in its recent article, by Rebecca Dzombak, “It’s Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is ‘Thirstier,’” that global warming is intensifying droughts by creating a “thirstier atmosphere” that sucks more moisture from the land. This assertion is false, clearly debunked by real-world data. The idea that a warming atmosphere is increasingly “demanding” water anthropomorphizes a complex physical process, and worse, ignores major natural variables—like volcanic activity and regional climate drivers—that actually influence drought more directly. Evidence suggests there is a record amount of water vapor in the atmosphere now, that droughts are regional, not global, and that “atmospheric thirst” is more rhetorical flourish than scientific fact.
Let’s begin with semantics. The atmosphere is not a sentient entity—it doesn’t get “thirstier.” That is a term more appropriate for a Gatorade commercial than climate science. What the researchers are referring to is an increase in potential evapotranspiration, a concept that has been well known for decades. Higher temperatures can increase the potential for evaporation—but that doesn’t mean evaporation always increases. Factors like humidity, cloud cover, soil moisture, ground cover, and wind speed all play major roles, and those often vary independently of global temperature.
Even more crucially, this narrative conveniently omits one of the most significant injections of water vapor into the atmosphere in recent history: the eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano in January 2022. According to a 2022 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the eruption blasted approximately 146 teragrams (146 million metric tons) of water vapor into the stratosphere—enough to increase global stratospheric water vapor by 10%. It documented a massive, unprecedented increase in stratospheric water vapor from a natural volcanic event—an event that should absolutely be part of any honest discussion about current atmospheric moisture and so-called “thirstier” drought models.
That Hunga Tonga’s injection of water vapor clearly shows up in the data from Copernicus as seen in the figure below:
https://climaterealism.com/2025/06/the-new-york-times-big-lie-about-the-atmosphere-being-thirstier/
