Hurricane Milton: How Right Wing Media Ignored a Report Showing Climate Change Made the Storm Much Worse

The weather. Polite society’s politest conversation. A delightfully innocuous icebreaker in an otherwise combative society.

Alas, no more. Hurricane Milton has ransacked that calm reserve and left us in a wasteland of meteorological machinations and red-faced debate. The weather has become yet another right-versus-left-wing battleground: Where did it come from? What should we do about it? Most unhinged of all, who’s controlling it?

With placid weather chitchat out the window, it’s official. Our democracy is in tornado-esque freefall. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the ‘populist’ formula for democratic success (clicks + outrage) has outgrown its masterminds.

The beast needs feeding – by anyone who would like to win an election. In 2024 America, that means claiming science is a sham, illegal aliens are profiting off hurricanes and the Government is controlling the weather.

This week, Hurricane Milton tore destruction across central Florida as rubble from the recent Hurricane Helene still remained to be cleared. Since the record-breaking Hurricane Maria left 3,000 people dead in 2017, commentary has increasingly turned to potential links between manmade global heating and evermore extreme weather.

This was the focus of a headline-making study published on Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution group, which concluded climate change made Hurricane Helene deadlier.

It found that ultra-warm ocean temperatures intensified wind speeds by 11% and rainfall by 10%, and fossil fuels have made similar hurricanes 2.5 times likelier to occur.

Even in a partisan media landscape, scientific studies should have a unifying effect. Challenges and anomalies are controlled for in the process, so editorial ‘both-sidesism’ can take a backseat.

It seems natural, therefore, that the World Weather Attribution report was primarily reported in politically-centrist news outlets. We used AI analyser Ground News to identify papers’ partisanship, but when we aggregated the headlines they collected on the study, we found a glaring omission: of the 28 outlets that reported it, 64% were centrist, 32% were left-leaning, and only one single headline was from a paper on the right.

There are many great things about partisan journalism (if partisanship is declared) – we all play our small role in the wider conversation. Endless creative spins on the same old story are what ultimately help the story sink in.

Where Byline Times reports Hurricane Milton as a media storm, Forbes ponders how many millions Disneyland Florida will lose this quarter, and Fox News advises evacuees on deterring looters.

These layered commentaries are essential to make the climate crisis feel real, as producer Thimali Kodikara explained on Media Storm: “Climate is not a subject that belongs to environmentalists and hippies, it belongs to every single one of us – it needs to be contextualised to our lives because people only want to save what they can relate to.”

But it’s one thing to tell us why news is relevant, another to tell us that science is not.

Search ‘hurricane’ and ‘climate change’ on Fox News, the top result is an article from 2022, headlined:‘Democrats blaming climate change for Hurricane Ian at odds with science’.

The article quotes ‘experts’ saying there is insufficient evidence to link climate change to individual disasters, just as “Democrats and progressive commentators continue to blame the hurricane on human-caused global warming”.

Something to note – this article is not based on an independently published, peer-reviewed scientific study, but instead has been curated by its authors at Fox News.

They have harvested quotes from a fringe scientific body called the CO2 Coalition, which was founded by a one-time advisor of Donald Trump and received $1million from energy executives and anti-regulation lobbyists in its founding years.

Climate business reporter Akshat Rathi diagnoses this on Media Storm as “false equivalence between political news and science news” – when news outlets exaggerate debate about established science.

Rathi continued: “99.7% of scientists will tell you climate change is happening because we are putting greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. The 0.3% are then treated as a single voice against the weight of evidence.”

While climate change is unmentioned in its coverage of Hurricane Milton, Fox News offers advice against looting that is comically opposed to energy-saving priorities: use an in-home generator to keep lights on and music playing, not just during hurricanes, but “in any situation” when you’re not home! Also, get your guns out. The article reminds us Florida is a “Stand Your Ground” state – “if you are home in the wake of Hurricane Milton and an intruder breaks into your property, you are within your rights to use a firearm”.

The one criticism we can’t levy this week is that Hurricane Milton has been underreported. This is unusual for climate-related stories. Reporting on the ‘frontlines’ of the climate crisis generally means speaking to indigenous and Global South communities who are rarely heard in our mainstream media.  As one Niger Delta ruler told us after his village was decimated from alleged Shell oil spills: “My story is very sad, and I don’t think anybody is listening. Or maybe people just don’t care.”

But oil spills in Nigeria, droughts in the Sahel, and famine in Sudan do not hold a candle to hurricanes over Disneyland or heatwaves in Europe. As the frontlines of the climate crisis shift westward, the media spotlight turns too, and the world’s biggest consumers start to care. But this is not good news for fossil fuel lobbies, and we risk seeing climate denialism resurface in our media.

Besides these calculated lobbying groups, there is a far more anarchic threat to established climate science: political democracy gone mad.

While climate change has been a focus in left and centrist coverage, conservative media look at gun rights and migrant wrongs. Fox News has been a key culprit in spreading Trump’s unfounded claims that disaster relief funds are being “syphoned off” to migrants.

The rumour is based on the fact that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which oversees hurricane relief through the Disaster Relief Fund, also manages some aspects of migration relief through its separate Food and Shelter Programme. There is no crossover.

The agency has actually had to create a webpage titled ‘Addressing Hurricane Helene Rumours and Scams’ to respond to political misinformation.

In today’s conspiratorial clickbait climate, not even the weather is sacred. Listen to Media Storm’s episode, ‘Climate Frontlines: The Truth about Big Oil’.