A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
------
CLAIM: Climate, weather or meteorological events that we would classify as "extreme" have declined in severity over the last 20 or 30 years.
THE FACTS: While the impacts of climate change vary across the globe, scientists agree that overall, human-caused warming is supercharging events such as extreme precipitation, droughts and forest fires. But a podcast clip shared on Instagram falsely claims that extreme climate, weather and meteorological events are actually declining in severity.
"We could look at accumulated cyclonic energy -- typhoons in the Pacific, hurricanes in the Atlantic -- and it's actually declined over the last 20 or 30 years," the speaker says in the video, which amassed thousands of likes. "We could look at forest fires, they've declined. We could look at droughts. By any measure that we care to look at, we can see that actually things have kind of calmed down a bit."
Scientists who study climate patterns say these kinds of extremes are aggravated by climate change -- and are becoming more severe, not less.
"Heat extremes are getting more frequent, more severe; precipitation extremes are getting more frequent, more severe," said Kai Kornhuber, a lecturer and research scientist at Columbia University. "Fire weather, which...
Times of Malta's editorial team has demanded that alleged money-launderer Chris Spiteri remove false claims posted on Facebook against journalist Jacob Borg. An alert has also been filed with the ...