2025 Sees Record-Low Number Of Weather-Related Deaths
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
The Guardian reported on a study tallying the costliest disasters of 2025.
“Cyclones and floods in Southeast 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 and hide the climate emergency that doesn’t exist.
“And so there’s no financial incentive for these platforms to take 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.
Organisations like World Weather Attribution produce ‘studies’ immediately following ‘extreme’ weather events that attribute these events to global warming, and claim it makes them many times more likely.
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, but that is exactly the opposite of what it actually does, as attibution is nothing more than opinion, which does not make it fact.
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.
See more here climatechangedispatch
Header image: Roger Pielke Jr
Some bold emphasis added
Tom
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Either one of two things happened. The weather overall was less severe or when severe weather occurred, not so many people were in its path. In 2025, global warming again failed to make an appearance for about the 50th year in a row. But maybe 2026 will be the magic year as the temperature here this morning is 57 degrees or about 20-25 degrees above normal.
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John V
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I believe both are true, probably, leaning more on the less active storm side.
I have read that $ involved in major storm events has risen and anyone with common sense knows that’s because there are more people and structures in the paths that weren’t there 50 or 100 years ago.
It would be interesting to plot the typical swaths that tornado alley sees and juxtaposed the increase in properties since 1950. I remember as a born and raised Chicago south side that when I was a kid in the 60s, rural kicked in ~6 miles from our house. Now, suburbia and warehousing has gone beyond that by 20-30 miles at least.
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Mike J
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I wonder how much the Rockefeller foundation and those others depend on what they’re trying to eliminate…
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