A former climate reporter said she deliberately avoided covering positive weather developments because doing so would have complicated the narrative that climate change posed an existential threat.
“When I was a climate reporter, I never covered positive climate stories because it would ‘muddy the narrative’ that climate change was an existential threat,” Lucy Biggers wrote Tuesday on X. “No one told me to behave this way. I chose to do this of my own volition.”
Biggers, who now works for The Free Press, pointed to the historically quiet 2026 Atlantic hurricane season as an example of the type of story she believes climate reporters may be reluctant to highlight.
“I think this is why we rarely see events like this year’s historically quiet eastern hurricane season covered widely by the news,” Biggers wrote. “Many reporters believe covering it will ‘give fodder to climate change deniers.'”
Just five tropical storms have formed, none reaching hurricane strength, The Weather Channel reported. The season also set a record Saturday for the latest start without a hurricane in the satellite era, which dates back to 1966, CBS News reported.
“[I]t was mostly soft self-censorship. I knew what the accepted beliefs of the climate movement were, and I wasn’t going to stick my neck out and challenge them. That would have been so much work and threatened my standing within the group,” Biggers, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“So I ignored anything that challenged the mainstream understanding of climate change anything positive about plastics, fossil fuels, or capitalism. I stayed away from those topics because I was protecting my own neck and wanted to fit in with the group,” Biggers said.
Biggers previously described herself as a former climate activist and said she spent years accepting the arguments of the climate movement without seriously questioning them while working at left-wing outlet NowThis News.
“I would say it is still common today. You can see it with the quiet east coast hurricane season we’re experiencing right now. Nobody is covering it in the same way they would if we were having a very active hurricane season on the East Coast,” Biggers told DCNF.
“If that were happening, we would never hear the end of it. But because the story doesn’t confirm a dangerous climate catastrophe, newsrooms are less inclined to cover it.”
Meteorologists have largely blamed the unusually quiet season on a powerful El Niño, a climate pattern marked by an unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean’s surface temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said El Niño increases vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, making it harder for hurricanes to form and organize.
The Atlantic hurricane season is far from over, however, with the National Hurricane Center listing Nov. 30 as its official end point.
“I basically spent half my twenties, kind of just buying everything as it was sold to me. Never really investigating,” Biggers said during a May appearance on TRIGGERnometry.
The former climate reporter said she had become convinced climate change represented an existential threat despite lacking what she now describes as a deep understanding of climate science.
“That was how turned off my critical thinking was, because I was getting so much support from being part of this movement that I just pushed it,” Biggers said.
While Biggers argued the quiet season has received limited coverage, several major news outlets have reported on the absence of hurricanes. The Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times have all covered the unusual lull in recent days.
“Climate reporters now frequently cover studies that project a frightening future without looking at the empirical evidence we already have,” Biggers said.
“Thank you, President Trump!” the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account wrote on X Sunday in response to a post from meteorologist Chris Martz, describing the hurricane season as historic.
Hellbound and Down 