When Climate Science Gets Ignored, Weather Porn Drives Headlines And Policy
Climate disaster science gets huge coverage. When it’s found to be wrong... crickets.
by Bjorn Lomborg October 21, 2025, 12:34 PM
In the world of climate politics, highly pessimistic scenarios can drive headlines and coverage, and so, in turn, have an impact on policy. [emphasis, links added]
Two recent unfortunate episodes show that the rush to shout “fire” means that some scenarios are gaining massive influence when they should instead be attracting skeptical reviews of the science used to construct them.
Take wildfires. Despite repeated claims of a “world on fire”, dataset after dataset shows that the world burns ever less in terms of burned area.
Disrupting this unhelpful reality, a splashy paper in Nature last year finally found a worrying narrative: “extreme wildfire events” had more than doubled globally over the past two decades.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/climate-science-ignored-headlines-policy/
