Analysis: Ohio has had weird, violent weather. Is it time to link it to climate change?

INDIAN LAKE, OHIO - MARCH 15: Heavily damaged homes are visible in the aftermath after tornadoes swept through the region on March 15, 2024 in Indian Lake, Ohio. The storms lead to casualties, deaths and many losing their homes. (Photo by Andrew Spear/Getty Images)

For two years running, Ohio has seen what used to be rare February tornadoes , followed by a deadly outbreak just last week. But news coverage of the twisters almost completely omitted any mention of climate change.

With climate scientists overwhelmingly agreeing that human-caused warming is happening and last year having the hottest average global temperature on record, is it time to start linking that to the weird weather we’ve been seeing?

Talking about climate change has for decades been a fraught subject for journalists.

Since at least the 1970s, fossil fuel producers such as ExxonMobil have known that digging up what used to be biomass and burning it was altering the atmosphere in a way that trapped the sun’s heat. But when energy executives calculated that public knowledge of that science would harm their bottom lines, they financed an elaborate disinformation campaign raising doubt about what was happening.

Propaganda shops like the Heartland Institute (which is now amplifying Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election) bombarded reporters with emails making them reluctant to state that anthropomorphic climate change was the scientific consensus that it actually was. The corporate-funded claims might have been garbage, but their frequency and ferocity intimidated the press into raising false doubts about climate change — much as it did about the addictiveness and harm of cigarettes a decade earlier.

For journalists covering weather events, it’s easier not to wade into the subject of Earth’s changing atmosphere and whether that has anything to do with the tornado or flood or hurricane or wildfire that they’re trying to cover. In fact, NPR reported in November, weather experts in the Midwest said that talking publicly about global warming brought them threats .

Not mentioning climate in such coverage is also easy to rationalize. No one weather event can be definitely attributed to global warming, many climate scientists have long said.

However, weather and climate are clearly linked, NASA says .

“As Earth’s climate changes, it is impacting extreme weather across the planet,” the agency reports. “Record-breaking heat waves on land and in the ocean, drenching rains, severe floods, years-long droughts, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent and more intense.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been keeping a kind of scorecard .

​​” Nine of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998,” EPA’s scientists say. “Average global temperatures show a similar trend, and all of the top 10 warmest years on record worldwide have occurred since 2005.”

Those facts seem to come with consequences:

• Heat waves — “Heat waves are occurring three times more often than they did in the 1960s—about six per year compared with two per year. The average heat wave season is 49 days longer, and individual heat waves are lasting longer and becoming more intense,” the EPA reported.
• Heavy precipitation — In the United States, nine of the 10 heaviest days for precipitation have occurred since 1996, EPA said.
• River flooding — “Floods have generally become larger across parts of the Northeast and Midwest and smaller in the West, southern Appalachia, and northern Michigan,” the agency said.
• Early-season tornadoes — There has been a big uptick over the past decade in twisters hitting in March and earlier, CNN reported in 2022.

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