You have probably noticed it yourself. The summers feel hotter and the headlines feel quieter. A few years ago climate change was on every front page. Now you can scroll for an hour and barely see it. That silence is easy to read as good news, as if the problem eased off while we were looking elsewhere. It did not. The distance between how fast the planet is warming and how often we hear about it has been widening, and 2025 made it hard to ignore. This is the story of that gap, climate coverage vs warming, why the reporting went quiet while the heat kept climbing, and one small thing you can do to keep it in view.
If you want to do something visible today rather than wait for the next headline, you can generate your message free at giftstory.ai and plant a tree as a gift.
Key Takeaways
- Global media coverage of climate change fell 14% in 2025 compared with 2024, even as 2025 became Earth’s third warmest year on record, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at CU Boulder.
- The warming did not pause. July 2026 tied 2024 as the warmest July on record, and the global ocean had its warmest July ever measured.
- NOAA expects 2026 to land among the five warmest years on record, most likely the third or fourth warmest, not the hottest.
- The planet is not getting quieter, the coverage is. Visible action, like planting a tree as a gift, is one way to keep the subject in front of people.
Why did climate coverage fall while the planet kept warming?
In 2025, media coverage of climate change dropped 14% from the year before, according to the MeCCO media tracker at CU Boulder, and that same year Earth reached its third warmest on record. The disasters were not subtle. Wildfires destroyed entire neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, and a deadly heatwave killed more than 24,000 people across Europe. Scientists were quick to connect many of these events to a warming climate. The coverage still shrank. That is the disconnect at the heart of this piece, and it is worth understanding before reading it as reassurance. It has become a real question whether anyone is still talking about climate change at the volume the science would suggest.
Is the warming actually slowing down?
No. NOAA reported that July 2026 tied 2024 as the warmest July on record, driven by record warm oceans and above average land temperatures. The Copernicus Climate Change Service measured the warmest July ocean surface on record at 20.96 degrees Celsius in July 2026, above the previous mark of 20.89 degrees set in 2023. NOAA expects 2026 to finish among the five warmest years on record, with the best odds on the third or fourth warmest. That is a step below the single hottest year, so it would be wrong to call 2026 the hottest on record, but it still sits inside the warmest cluster ever measured. If you want the fuller picture on the ranking, we looked at whether 2026 is the hottest year on record in a separate piece. The heat is steady. The attention is not.
What is driving the disconnect between warming and coverage?
Several forces are pulling at once, and not one of them is that the problem got smaller. MeCCO points to political and economic pressure on newsrooms, along with consolidation and staff cuts that leave fewer reporters covering the beat. There is also a finite amount of news space, fought over by competing stories on every side. Editors sense that readers are growing tired of climate coverage, and some journalists hesitate to link events like wildfires to a changing climate because the subject has become so politicised. Put those together and you get the three quiet drivers behind the fall: fatigue, competing crises, and a shrinking supply of climate reporting, all pushing the same way.
What can one person do when the news goes quiet?
Keep it visible in the small, human ways that do not need a headline to survive. A gift is a message, a bridge between two people. When you send someone a tree, you put the living world back inside a personal moment, and you give them a reason to keep looking at it long after the news cycle has moved on. ForestNation is a corporate tree gifting company that has helped more than 500 businesses plant nearly 2 million trees in Tanzania through verified reforestation. Through a Gift Story, the digital message that carries the gift, you write your words, a real tree is planted in Tanzania, and the person you send it to follows that tree on its own named Forest Profile. They do not have to dig or water anything. They watch it grow from wherever they are. Every tree is a contribution to verified reforestation in Tanzania, tracked and counted, and you can read the ForestNation impact methodology to see exactly how that is measured.
Imagine the person you send it to, months from now, opening their Forest Profile to check on a tree that is still growing in Tanzania, and thinking about why you sent it. The news moved on. The tree did not.
The coverage may be quiet, but the planet is louder than ever, and a tree is a way to answer it in your own voice. You can create your message free at giftstory.ai and send your first tree as a gift today. Warming up, tuning out is only half the story. The other half is what we choose to keep in view.
Research and References
- Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO), CU Boulder. Climate change media coverage fell 14% in 2025. colorado.edu
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Assessing the Global Climate in July 2026. noaa.gov
- Copernicus Climate Change Service. Highest July global ocean surface temperatures. copernicus.eu
