A new Swedish Radio investigation has me asking - Does anyone care?

The Honest Broker, Roger Pielke Jr., Mar 05, 2025

Let me tell you about sea level rise.

I was speaking to a non-US non-climate beat reporter yesterday about undeniable issues of scientific integrity in climate science and he asked a question about the climate science community that got my attention:

“And no one cares? Aren’t scientists supposed to care about such things?”

Lapses of scientific integrity in climate science have become normalized. I no longer expect the community to care about obvious and egregious problems in climate science, even when documented in the peer reviewed literature. The community’s willful blindness has had a long time to develop muscle memory — More than 15 years ago I documented how the IPCC falsified a graph on disasters and climate change, inserted it into the IPCC assessment, and then lied about it when called out. No one cared then either.

A few weeks Sveriges Radio (Swedish public radio) released an English language version of its outstanding investigation into multiple exaggerations and falsehoods about climate change that have been promoted by the United Nations. Props to Swedish journalist Ola Sandstig and Sveriges Radio for conducting the investigation — they obviously care.

False claims and bad science are endemic to discussions of climate, but they should not come from the UN, which is the parent organization of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose job it is to call things straight on climate science. The climate science community should care that the UN has been systematically misrepresenting climate science, because it could affect how the IPCC is viewed, fairly or unfairly.

The Swedish investigation documented four false claims promoted by the UN. Let’s take a look at each.

1. Samoan Sea Level Rise Misinformation

Caption by the UN: “UN Secretary-General António Guterres visits an house that has been abandoned due to storm damage and flooding as a result of climate change during his trip to Samoa.” 22 Aug 2024.

In what can only be described as propaganda, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Samoa last year and filmed a video in front of an abandoned house, which he claimed was abandoned due to sea level rise and increasing storms:

"Those who lived in these houses had to move their homes further inland because of sea level rise and the multiplication of storms. Sea level rise is accelerating. It is now the double of what it was in the 90s. If we are not able to stop what is happening with climate change, the problem that we see in Samoa will not stay in Samoa."

Ola Sandstig, the Swedish journalist, tracked down those who had abandoned the house in 2009, and found that they had actually left the home following the 2009 earthquake and tsunami, and not sea level rise or storms. Earthquakes and tsunamis have nothing to do with climate change.

There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in the Western South Pacific (or, the entire planet, for that matter). In fact, in 2009 when the house was abandoned following the tsunami, the region was in a bit of a tropical cyclone lull.

Source: Pacific Islands Climate Change Monitor 2022 PICCM caption: “ Like the other sub-regions, long-term trends do not suggest a notable up or down trend in the frequency or magnitude of major cyclones across the region. The recent period between 2010-2020 does indicate fewer major cyclones than 1995-2005 but the frequency counts are so low to begin with that these slight changes are not statistically significant.”

Relative sea level rise has accelerated in Samoa. But that also has nothing to do with climate change, but rather, increased subsidence following the 2009 earthquake.

The reasons for the accelerated relative sea level rise are well understood, such as documented in Han et al. 2019:

The islands entered a new era of exacerbated (3–6 times faster) relative sea level rise due to continuous land subsidence after the 2009 earthquakes.

UN Secretary General Guterres’ Samoan photo op and press release can only be described as an intential effort to mislead.

2. A UN Correction — 1.7 million children die each year from climate change

Thanks to the Swedish Radio investigation, Swedish UNICEF corrected a false claim that it had previously been promoting — that 1.7 million children die each year due to climate change. Swedish Radio explains:

1.7 million children under the age of five die each year from climate change. Swedish UNICEF has had this figure on their website since 2019-09-27. It was removed after the Swedish version of the program in the fall of 2024. The article now states: 'In a previous version of the article, it was stated that 1.7 million children die from climate change. This is incorrect, the figure refers to environmental factors such as air pollution and dirty water.'

Mistakes happen what matters is what happens after they are identified. Swedish UNICEF shows how easy it is to correct false claims.

3. A mythical number — Women and children are 14x more than men to die due to a climate disaster

Source: UNDP, accessed 5 March 2025.

The 14x number has been around for decades and is found across UN organizations. Swedish Radio explains:

Women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster / Women are 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster. These figures appear on the following UN agencies/websites: UN main page, UN Women, UNDP, UNDRR, UNESCO, UN, FAO, IUCN.

The claim is false, and others have pointed this out as well. In 2014, Henrik Urdal of the Peace Research Institute Oslo asked of the false claim, “Is it Acceptable to Lie for a Good Cause?”. He expalined where the false number came from (ironically, the University of Colorado Boulder):

The claim that women and children are up to 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster is a classic example of a ‘mythical number’. It took fewer than five minutes to find and cross-check the source. Save the Children was citing a report published by Plan International in 2013. Both Save the Children and Plan refer to what at first glance seems to be to an article published in a research periodical, Natural Hazards Observer, in 1997. The article turns out, however, to be a two-page opinion piece authored by a pastor associated with Church World Service, a US ecumenical organization. Pastor Kristina Peterson does not provide any sources to back up her claim.

Swedish Radio tracked down Pastor Peterson in Lousiana, who expressed surprise that her undocumented claim form 1997 was making the rounds as scientific fact in 2024. Ola Sandstig contacted the UN for comment, and received no response.

4. Too good not to be true — The number of weather disasters has fivefolded since the 1970s.

The claim that disasters have increased by a factor of five over the past half century comes from the World Meteorological Organizaion (WMO) whch misrepresented the EM-DAT dataset, something longtime THB readers will be familiar with. The WMO report promoting the false claim was titled, ironically enough, United in Science.

The increase in disasters in the EM-Dat dataset from the 1970s results entirely from improved reporting of disasters from the 1970s to the 2000s. Since 2000 there has been no increase in reported disasters, as you’ll see below.

Swedish Radio interviewed Deborati Guha-Sapir, who oversaw the EM-DAT database in Belgium for decades, and I have transcribed her responses at length here:

Reporting has improved in the sense that in a statistically misleading way because as communications becomes cheaper, easier, and now it is almost free and people are traveling a lot more you get much more reports of events as you can imagine. That may have happened before as well but we just didn’t get the reports . . .

You can actually argue that climate disasters or natural disasters have not actually substantially increased but the reporting has been much, much easier, much better, much quicker . . .

What can I say? I do think it is misleading and there is no point in misleading your audience, and to not underestimate the intelligence of your audience. Tell people the truth. People will understand . . .

People like a number and the more spectacular the better. All this behind the scenes explanation that says “Oh, better reporting” nobody is interested in that. It’s boring.

If we show that actually the number of disasters are not increasing two things happen. One is people say “how can this be, everyone says disasters are increasing” and Guha-Sapir is coming and saying “They are not increasing.” There is no evidence, no data. I am not saying they are not, I’m just saying our data doesn’t show it . . .

I think there a risk, credibility and trustworthiness of the data is dependent entirely on the quality and the accuracy of the data you provide. And if you are unable to maintain that, you are going to bring the whole thing down like a house of cards, because people won’t believe what you are saying any more . . .

Guha-Sapir states what should be obvious:

What really needs to be done is to be fair and accurate in your data and speak as good of scientific truth that you can.

Ola Sandstig was able to get a response from a UN official, who appeared to blame the misinformation on people who do not understand the data and not the false claims from the UN and WMO:

When you have this type of information there is this tendency to rushing to the striking pieces and the background information may be omitted by some people. Maybe some communicators or whatever don’t really appreciate the components that build the trend, but I’m telling you we are taking it seriously and we want to address the challenge here.

If the UN is taking the misinformation seriously, it is difficult to tell — The UN is using the misleading data to project a significant increase in global disasters to 2030, as you can see below.

Below is what the latest EM-DAT time series looks like since 2000, when reporting is believed to have become globally reliable. EM-DAT still needs to be used with caution. Reminder: If you want to look for trends in extreme weather, look directly at weather and climate data, not data on disasters.

Graph created by Matthew Wielicki on X/Twitter. Note that how EM-DAT treats temperature-related deaths is not consistent across the time series, which may result in a upwards bias in recent years — See this post for discussion. You can explore this data at Our World in Data.

Bottom Line

The climate science community has a poor track record of addressing misinformation associated with those promoting climate change as a political agenda. This has been called noble cause corruption. If the United Nations is among those promoting such misinformation, we should not be surprised if the credibility of IPCC — which sits under the UN — becomes called into question, fairly or unfairly.

Does anybody actually care?

You can listen to the Swedish Radio report in English here — highly recommended, excellent and rare reporting on climate.