Here we go again with the coral reef panic. 🪸 Associated Press (10/22/2026): “The world's coral reef ecosystems all face high risk of collapse in the next 50 years.” CNN essentially said the same thing 26 years ago. CNN (12/11/2000): “[A]bout 16% of the world's reefs were destroyed in nine months and about half of those ruined reefs will be gone forever. [I]f nothing is done to change current trends, 60% of the world's reefs will be lost by 2030.”

This is a LIE. The United Nations apparently does not read their own IPCC reports. Globally, floods have not become more frequent or more intense, although there are regional variations within the bounds of internal variability. There are two primary types of floods relevant to this discussion: fluvial (river) and flash (pluvial). Long-term trends in river floods are usually evaluated by looking at river and streamflow from river / stream gauges. This can be evaluated by looking at the flux of water passing by a fixed point, and we measure this in units of cubic feet per second (ft³ / sec). With respect to river flooding trends, IPCC AR6 WG1 states in Chapter 11 that, 🗨️ “Peak flow trends are characterized by high regional variability and lack overall statistical significance of a decrease or an increase over the globe as a whole. Of more than 3,500 streamflow stations in the USA, central and Northern Europe, Africa, Brazil, and Australia, 7.1% stations showed a significant increase, and 11.9% stations showed a significant decrease in annual maximum peak flow during 1961–2005.” 🔗ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downl… (p. 1568) With respect to attributing flooding trends to human influence, the IPCC states, 🗨️ “In summary there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence...” 🔗ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downl… (p. 1569) More recent streamflow data from USGS gauges (and compiled by the U.S. EPA) affirm the IPCC’s synthesis in that river floods in the U.S. have neither increased nor decreased over the last 60+ years. The map I made below on the left shows the change in the magnitude of river flooding in the Lower 48 since 1960. The triangle-shaped markers show the annual linear trend in peak river flows (ft³ / sec) from 1960 to 2025 for all 425 USGS river / stream gauges having at at least 95% completeness over the period examined. Only ~5.2% of gauges show a statistically significant increase in river floods and ~5.9% show a significant decrease. The rest are not statistically significant in either direction, so overall the trend isn’t statistically different from zero. With respect to flash flooding IPCC AR6 says, 🗨️ “[H]eavier rainfall does not always lead to greater flooding. This is because flooding also depends upon the type of river basin, the surface landscape, the extent and duration of the rainfall, and how wet the ground is before the rainfall event... A mix of both increases and decreases in [flash] flooding have been observed in some regions...” 🔗ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downl… (p. 8) Ahmadalipour & Moradkhani (2019) found no increase in flash flooding incidents in the U.S. between 1996 and 2017. I suspect that these trends have continued, but an update to this paper would be nice. 🔗sciencedirect.com/science/ar…