According to NOAA, “2020 was a historic year of extremes,” with 22 separate extreme weather events in the U.S. costing nearly $100 billion in damages. Thirty named storms also made 2020 a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. Out west, wildfires burned over 5 million acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, with climate scientist Daniel Swain telling The New York Times, “We’ve broken almost every record there is to break.” Many of these events were related to the dangerous and record-breaking heat wave that blanketed most of the U.S. during the summer of 2020.
Extreme weather affected much of the globe. Australian wildfires from late 2019 into 2020 were the country’s most expensive on record, burning over 46 million acres. Reviewing the fires later in 2020, an Australian governmental commission noted that “more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires are very likely to occur throughout Australia in the future due to a warming climate.” Siberia also saw exceptional heat, and research from the World Weather Attribution project found that the “Siberian heat wave and record heat in the Arctic would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” Additionally, climate change influenced a deadly monsoon flooding season in India as well.
All of these events happened as 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record in human history. Notably, not a single nightly news segment mentioned the economic damages wrought by these events as part of the cost of climate inaction.
Broadcast TV nightly news and Sunday morning shows aired a combined 31 segments that mentioned climate change when reporting on extreme weather in 2020. Twenty-eight of these -- 90% -- came during coverage of either Australian or U.S. wildfires, with the overwhelming majority of climate mentions -- 24 segments -- reporting on the devastating wildfires in California and other parts of the western U.S. Climate change’s impact on other events, like heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes, was barely mentioned in extreme weather reporting.
Wildfire coverage
Nightly news shows connected the Australia wildfires to climate change in four segments. ABC’s World News Tonight ran two segments, while NBC Nightly News and CBS Evening News ran one each. The quality of this climate coverage was generally shallow -- three out of the four segments had climate change as a secondary focus in discussing the wildfires. Additionally, there were no climate scientists interviewed or featured in these segments. The January 15 edition of ABC’s World News Tonight was unique in that it also mentioned 2019 being the second hottest year ever and that heat levels are very high in the ocean, in addition to covering the Australian wildfires.
Climate change was mentioned 24 times in reporting on the western U.S. wildfires in the latter half of 2020. CBS mentioned climate change 10 times, followed by ABC with 8 mentions and NBC with 5. Fox News Sunday did 1 segment on the western wildfires. The bulk of these mentions -- 21 out of the 24 -- came in a seven-day period from September 8-14.
Only two scientists were featured in these western wildfire segments; both appeared on NBC Nightly News. On the September 11 edition of NBC Nightly News, climate scientist Daniel Swain of UCLA stated, “The climate is warmer and more conducive to extreme fire behavior than it once was.” On the September 21 edition, fire scientist Jennifer Balch of the University of Colorado said, “We have essentially built a nightmare into flammable landscapes, made even worse by climate change.”
Notably, the apocalyptic wildfires prompted three out of the four major Sunday shows (with the exception of Fox News Sunday) to include substantive mentions of climate change during their September 13 episodes. Even these instances revealed that the climate discussion around the wildfires was driven by the guests, who were responding to the hosts’ narrow, sometimes conservatively framed questions or misinformation around forest management that Trump threw out to chum the waters of climate denial.
In fact, seven of the 24 western U.S. wildfire segments in 2020 revolved around Trump’s meeting with California state officials on September 14 in which he downplayed climate change’s link to the fires. In reality, experts have heavily refuted Trump’s baseless claim that the science on climate change is unsettled and his exclusive focus on forest management.
Four of these segments included pushback to Trump’s claim that “I don’t think science knows, actually” -- once each on the ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news shows and once on the September 13 edition of ABC's This Week. In the latter episode, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee refuted Trump’s forest management claims.
The remaining three segments did not include any pushback at all to Trump’s climate denial. Two of these failures came on ABC’s World News Tonight and one came on CBS Evening News.
Other extreme weather events
Climate change was mentioned four times in reporting on drought, hurricanes, heat waves, and general extreme weather in 2020. All of these mentions came on CBS Evening News. On May 16, climate change was mentioned in a segment on a western U.S. megadrought, which scientists say has been the worst in nearly 1,200 years. On September 6, meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Beradelli linked the western U.S. heat wave to climate change, stating, “Climate change took a run-of-the-mill heat wave and it made it into a remarkable heat wave.” On November 15, anchor Jamie Yuccas mentioned climate change in an overview of the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, noting, “Scientists say the record number of storms this season is connected to the climate crisis.” Finally, in a November 28 interview with Arctic biologist Allison Fong, climate change was linked to worsening extreme weather events around the globe.
Broadcast TV nightly news and Sunday shows have generally been awful at connecting climate change to hurricanes and heat waves. 2020 proved no different.
Other climate impacts
After the effect of climate change on supercharging extreme weather events, the second most discussed climate impact in 2020 was its effects on plants and wildlife, including marine and aquatic life. CBS Evening News aired seven such segments, covering climate change’s impact on sea lions and Antarctic penguins and the California wildfires’ impacts on plants and wildlife. ABC’s World News Tonight aired two such segments -- one discussing a University of Arizona report on the potential extinction of numerous plant and animal species, and another on the 2020 State of the World's Plants and Fungi report -- while NBC Nightly News aired just one, a July segment on climate change’s effects on aquatic life in the Great Lakes.
2020 election-related coverage
Broadcast TV nightly news and Sunday shows aired 16 climate segments on the 2020 election. Eight of these segments mentioned Biden’s climate plan, which aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in the U.S. by 2050, while the other eight mentioned climate change’s role in the election in a general sense. Seven of the eight segments mentioning Biden’s climate plan came on Sunday morning political shows.
NBC shows aired seven segments on climate and the 2020 election -- six on Nightly News and one on Meet the Press. CBS aired four -- three on CBS Evening News and one on Face the Nation. ABC aired three, all on This Week, and Fox News Sunday aired two. Several of these segments were about post-election news, including Biden’s plan to nominate John Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate.
