Media continues to ring climate alarm, but 2025 saw the fewest deaths from extreme weather ever

As 2025 came to a close, the legacy media was topping off its coverage of climate in the preceding 12 months. CBS News reported the year was so hot, “it pushed Earth past the critical climate change mark.” ABC News had a “year in review” article recounting stories about wildfires, floods and extreme heat, and The Guardian reported on a study tallying the costliest disasters of 2025. 

“Cyclones and floods in south-east Asia this autumn killed more than 1,750 people and caused more than $25bn (£19bn) in damage, while the death toll from California wildfires topped 400 people,” The Guardian article states in the opening paragraph. 

One story The Guardian and other outlets aren’t reporting is that extreme weather in 2025 claimed the fewest lives in recorded history. 

Less than 1 per 100,000

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spent 30 years researching the impacts of climate change while he was a professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado-Boulder. 

On his “The Honest Broker” Substack, Pielke estimates that there were 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people across the globe in 2025. Despite media reports that climate change is bringing death and destruction at every turn, deaths from extreme weather per 100,000 people have been falling rapidly for decades. 

There were more than 320 deaths per 100,000 in 1960, and approximately 1.3 deaths per 100,000 in 1990. There have been six years since 2000, Pielke notes, in which deaths per 100,000 population were less than 1, and they all have happened since 2014. 

Selling extremes aligned with funding sources

David Blackmon, author of the “Energy Absurdities” Substack and an analyst with more than 40 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, told Just the News that the drive to generate audiences plays a role in why the legacy media ignore good news when it comes to climate. 

“Catastrophe sells better than calm weather,” Blackmon said. 

Beyond those incentives, to which all media businesses are susceptible, is the funding directly and indirectly flowing into the legacy media from anti-fossil fuel activist groups, Blackmon said. Inside Climate News, for example, is funded by numerous climate advocacy groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. 

To promote news favorable to its political goals, Inside Climate News has regularly partnered with broadcast networks and newspapers, including NBC News, the Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Last year, CBS News teamed up with the activist publication for an article that was critical of efforts to recycle plastics. 

The Associated Press received $8 million from climate advocacy groups in 2022 directly in support of its climate and energy reporting. These political advocacy groups include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Quadrivium and the Rockefeller Foundation, which has pledged over $1 billion between 2023 and 2028 to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. 

The Associated Press discloses this funding at the bottom of articles on climate and energy issues. However, it refers to the groups simply as "philanthropies" without any mention of their pro-green energy agendas.

“Many of these outlets take money from billionaires and their charitable foundations who have created these phony media operations like Inside Climate News to run negative stories about the climate and to try to hide the climate emergency that doesn't exist. And so there's no financial incentive for these platforms taking all that money to report any of this good news,” Blackmon said. 

Media climate alchemy

The CBS article reporting that 2025 was the "hottest year ever" cites an analysis by the World Weather Attribution, which helped develop the field of “attribution science” for the purpose of environmental litigation. The field produces studies immediately following extreme weather events that purport to find that global warming is making the event many times more likely. 

The World Weather Attribution was founded to help climate activists win lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Its co-founder, climatologist Friederike Otto, told Politico in 2019, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” 

Otto explained in a Concordia University interview last year that this field of science is part of a legal strategy to arm plaintiffs in lawsuits against oil companies with a scientific basis for their complaints. Pielke has criticized its methods and compared its conclusions to the ancient pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy. The organization’s research gets extensive media coverage, but rarely do the reports include critics of its conclusions. 

Attribution bias

Writing in The Wall Street Journal last month, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, pointed out that the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended without a single hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S. — a first since 2015. 

A New York Times article in October reported on this fact, and the article is notable for not mentioning climate change despite being on the topic of extreme weather. 

“The journalists seem to believe that climate change can cause only bad outcomes. If warmer oceans energize storms, couldn’t they also influence other meteorological phenomena that diverted this year’s hurricanes harmlessly out to sea?” Lomborg wrote. 

Lomborg argues there are other instances in which global warming may have lowered the impacts of other extreme weather events, such as cold weather events made milder by rising temperatures or increased rainfalls that reduced the effects of drought. 

Attribution science never produces studies to find out how much global warming made such outcomes more likely, and reporters covering climate never explore the possibility, Lomborg wrote. 

Shortly after Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica with 185mph winds and flooding, World Weather Attribution conducted a study that found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that climate change made the storm worse. 

Meteorologist Chris Martz told Just the News that attribution science gets a lot of coverage, but it has a number of problems the media never point out. This includes the lack of peer review, lacking any empirical evidence to support its conclusions, and excluding data prior to 1950, which includes extreme heat wave events in the 1930s that couldn’t have been caused by climate change. 

“It's not how good science is conducted. They're not going to do it if there’s a lack of destruction or a lack of suffering. It's kind of sad, but they're not going to report on that,” Martz said. 

Fingers crossed

Martz said he thinks things are getting a bit better when it comes to media coverage of extreme weather and climate change. He thinks with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss taking over at CBS as editor-in-chief, the outlet may produce more balanced coverage of climate. 

“I'm hoping — and fingers crossed — that we can get good reporting from them on this front,” Martz said. 

As for the others, such as the Associated Press, Martz said he’s less certain that change is coming. Blackmon said there’s been some relaxing of the alarmist narratives, and it’s likely because people aren’t buying into it as much. Polls are showing that fewer people across the world view climate change as a major threat than they did a few years ago. However, Blackmon said, change isn’t likely until the money dries up. 

“Money drives everything. And when your media outlet is being paid to push the alarm narrative, and it's the difference between being in business and going bankrupt, obviously you’re going to push the narratives,” Blackmon said. 

Science, technology and policy

In his article, Pielke uses data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, which is graphed on Our World in Data. That data set shows that the world saw 4,500 deaths related to extreme weather events through October 2025. 

Two cyclones in South and Southeast Asia, which were the focus of The Guardian article, in the final two months of 2025 caused flooding killing an estimated 1,600 people, as well as several other events. If the initial estimates of these events turn out to be accurate then 2025 will be the lowest total deaths ever recorded. 

Pielke points out that there’s been some luck involved in the low death rates over the past couple of decades and extreme weather events causing mass deaths are still possible, but whatever the final data shows, 2025 is part of a long-time trend toward decreasing deaths from extreme weather. 

“Underlying this trend lies the successful application of science, technology, and policy in a world that has grown much wealthier and thus far better equipped to protect people when, inevitably, extreme events do occur,” Pielke wrote.