During the United Nations (UN) COP27 climate summit in Egypt, "November's snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere was running at rates exceeding a half-a-century average," says a December 3, 2022 article from Zero Hedge, a conspiratorial website that has previously published misinformation. "Most mainstream media outlets overlooked this data because it is an inconvenient truth for the climate change narrative they're pushing."
The claim was republished by blogs and shared in posts on Facebook and Twitter, including in French. An article tweeted by Patrick Moore, a prominent climate change denier who has made false claims about his links to Greenpeace, was shared thousands of times on Twitter.
The articles cite graphs and maps with data from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University in the state of New Jersey. The numbers indicate northern hemisphere snow extent reached about 41 million square kilometers (16 million square miles) in November, a 56-year high.
But experts say the data do not reflect the trend for average snow extent.
"You can't link one map or even one month to global climate change. One needs to...
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