West Virginia is one of the few states that broadly rejects much of the kabuki theater surrounding the climate catastrophe narrative. For the past several years, state legislators—including Democrats—have pushed back on calls to eliminate the state’s coal industry. Meanwhile, Mountain State attorneys general have signed on to lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bureaucracies for overstepping in the name of climate, and in 2022, severed ties with financial institutions pushing the environment, social, and governance (ESG) agenda.
Still, for decades, climate activists have targeted West Virginia’s coal and gas industries, at the power generation level, and via increasingly stringent carbon dioxide regulations.
West Virginians are justified in their frustration with climate alarmist propaganda because their region’s robust coal industry should never have been sacrificed on the altar of climate change in the first place. The evidence for looming catastrophes and weather chaos across West Virginia is just not there if one cares to examine and understand the data.
After digging deep into the data for West Virginia, along with other U.S. states, to see what climate change has done to their weather and general environment, it is clearly obvious the climate catastrophe claims espoused by the experts and breathlessly reported in the media are plainly a false alarm.
Temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that average temperatures in the state year-round have increased since the year 1900. By how much? A whole degree. One degree Fahrenheit. That’s it. But I have been told that even a small change can cause spiraling problems. After all, a degree of warming probably means there are more heatwaves and extreme heat in general… or does it?
Data for West Virginia show that the number of “very hot” days, or days with temperatures of 95°F or higher, has massively declined since the first half of the 20th century. There are fewer extremely hot days in West Virginia today than there were in the late 1980s.
In many states, the average temperature rise is caused not by an increase in hot days, but by an increase in warm nights, which is more explained by the Urban Heat Island effect than by carbon dioxide.
As the EPA states, “Structures such as buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes such as forests and water bodies … [which] results in daytime temperatures in urban areas about 1–7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas and nighttime temperatures about 2–5°F higher.”
In West Virginia, there is no long-term trend in warmer nights, but a very mild increase since about 1990. The number of extremely cold nights also doesn’t show a long-term trend since 1900, but there are fewer extremely cold nights in recent decades than there were in the 1970s and 1980s. This is a good thing: cold kills far more people than heat.
Other kinds of weather are equally as non-concerning. Drought is not getting worse for the state, and even though there has been a slight increase in precipitation overall, it has not corresponded to an increase in extreme precipitation events, including blizzards or floods. This is important because flooding is one of the serious threats West Virginians face due to the topography of the state.
If West Virginians are more concerned about the future of the coal industry and alleviating poverty than they are about climate change, it’s for good reason. Mountain Staters aren’t suffering from climate change, and neither are the rest of us. Real-world data show that extreme weather is not getting worse, nor more frequent, regardless of what the climate industrial complex says and the media parrots.
Linnea Lueken ([email protected], X: @LinneaLueken) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
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