People wade past stranded trucks on a flooded street in Sunamganj, Bangladesh on June 21, 2022. Floods are a regular menace to millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh, but experts say climate change is increasing their frequency, ferocity, and unpredictability. Credit: Mamun Hossain/AFP via Getty Images
December, for many, marks a time for reflection—a moment to take stock of the year’s accomplishments before sliding back into the daily grind of life. That’s why the last newsletter edition for the year will be dedicated to looking back at the stories that resonated the most with Today’s Climate readers in 2022.
In general, it has been a big year for my colleagues at Inside Climate
our reporters have worked tirelessly to bring you some of the most important climate stories of the year. And we’ve gotten a lot of love from you, our readers, who continue to share and support our work.
It has also been a banner year for Today’s Climate, with readership seeing record growth since we relaunched the newsletter in the fall of 2021. So, before we ring in the new year, I hope you’ll enjoy—as much as I have—looking back at the most popular Today’s Climate issues of 2022.
Here are the top 5 newsletter stories of the year:
From Kentucky’s deadly floods to the record wildfires and drought across the American West, this summer epitomized, in many ways, what climate scientists have been warning about for decades.
So it was surprising to me, after yet another disaster-filled summer, to see a petition supposedly signed by “over 1,100 scientists and professionals” suddenly go viral online in mid-August, claiming that “there is,” in fact, “no climate emergency.” Immediately, I reached out to some of the leading climate researchers in their fields who were quick to point out that the petition wasn’t as it seemed.
“Looking at the list of signatories, there are a lot of engineers, medical doctors, and petroleum geologists and almost no actual climate scientists,” Zeke Hausfather, one of the world’s top climate modeling researchers, told me. Other climate experts noted that the group behind the message—the Climate Intelligence Foundation, or CLIENTELE—has well-documented ties to oil money and fossil fuel interest groups and that the petition appeared to recirculate old climate-denial tropes.
To me, the moment was a reminder of why I got into journalism in the first place: to provide accurate, verifiable, and fair information for the sake of truth and healthy public debate.
In April, an estimated 1,000 scientists in more than 25 countries staged demonstrations to demand that world leaders do far more to reduce climate-warming emissions, including a handful of researchers who were arrested for locking themselves to entryways leading into the White House and major banks that fund fossil fuel projects.
While the actions themselves were common for climate activists and social movements in general, it was a striking moment when members of the scientific community departed from their typical role as neutral information providers and picked up the torch of activism.
“I feel very strongly that we have a moral responsibility to do everything we can to wake up the public now, especially since it’s very clear that for decades, only residing within the peer-reviewed literature has not worked at all,” Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who has now been arrested several times for civil disobedience related to climate protests, told me in an interview. “Scientists are people too, and we’re citizens, and we’re parents, and we also have a right to speak out like this.”
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