A few weeks Sveriges Radio (Swedish public radio) released an English-language version of its outstanding investigation into multiple exaggerations and falsehoods about climate change that have been promoted by the United Nations. Props to Swedish journalist Ola Sandstig and Sveriges Radio for conducting the investigation — they obviously care.

False claims and bad science are endemic to discussions of climate, but they should not come from the UN, which is the parent organization of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose job it is to call things straight on climate science.

The climate science community should care that the UN has been systematically misrepresenting climate science, because it could affect how the IPCC is viewed, fairly or unfairly.

The Swedish investigation documented four false claims promoted by the UN. Let’s take a look at each.

1. Samoan Sea Level Rise Misinformation In what can only be described as propaganda, UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Samoa last year and filmed a video in front of an abandoned house, which he claimed was abandoned due to sea level rise and increasing storms

2. A UN Correction — 1.7 million children die each year from climate change Thanks to the Swedish Radio investigation, Swedish UNICEF corrected a false claim that it had previously been promoting — that 1.7 million children die each year due to climate change.

3. A mythical number — Women and children are 14x more than men to die due to a climate disaster The 14x number has been around for decades and is found across UN organizations. Swedish Radio explains: These figures appear on the following UN agencies/websites: UN main page, UN Women, UNDP, UNDRR, UNESCO, UN, FAO, IUCN. The claim is false, and others have pointed this out as well. In 2014, Henrik Urdal of the Peace Research Institute Oslo asked of the false claim, “Is it Acceptable to Lie for a Good Cause?”.

4. Too good not to be true - The number of weather disasters has five folded since the 1970s. “The number of weather, climate, and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.” UN Secretary General António Guterres 2022 The claim that disasters have increased by a factor of five over the past half-century comes from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which misrepresented the EM-DAT dataset.

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