In a lengthy feature in its February 5, 2023, Sunday edition, the New York Times told the heart-breaking story of a young couple who lost their home to Hurricane Harvey.

Written by Jake Bittle, described as “a reporter covering climate, housing and energy,” the article was adapted from his forthcoming book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. The article claims that Harvey and other “climate disasters” destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes across the United States in 2017, including thousands in and around Houston. The unmistakable implication is that in the absence of “climate change” these losses wouldn’t have occurred.

The tragedies of people whose homes were destroyed and lives upended by Hurricane Harvey (or similar storms) are real enough without exploiting them as opportunities to promote claims about how climate change might have caused them—or at least made them worse than they otherwise would have been.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere over the last century or so have reduced the climate system’s ability to cool itself by about 1%, or, if we take into account the energy-holding potential of the oceans as well, about 0.25%.

Assuming a linear relationship (and though nobody knows whether that’s the case, there’s no good reason to think otherwise), that implies that 99% to 99.75% of the energy in hurricanes cannot be attributed to human GHG emissions, even if those emissions raise global temperature as much as the IPCC calculates. Harvey’s maximum sustained winds at Houston were ~130 mph; the linear relationship, then, would suggest that just 0.325 to 1.3 mph of that could be attributed to climate change. It dropped 60 inches of rain in 4 days; the linear relationship, then, would suggest that just 0.15 to 0.6 inch could be attributed to climate change.

To put it the other way, 99% to 99.75% of the wind and rain—and consequently 99% to 99.75% of the damage caused—could not be attributed to climate change. The bit that could would be essentially indiscernible.

Journalists like Bittle do the public no favors by exaggerating the risks of climate change. They owe it to their readers to do their homework more carefully.

Satellite photo of Hurricane Harvey nearing landfall August 25, 2017, NOAA.