In 1990, PBS aired a completely one-sided climate panic series called Race to Save the Planet, which argued we could face very serious trouble by the year 2000. PBS is still shamelessly pushing their standard environmental alarmism to the boiling point this week.
Yes, from the glaciers of Washington State to sweltering south Georgia farmland, “climate change” is coming for coastal communities and farmers. Ben Tracy, long-time environmental activist reporter for CBS, now does occasional scaremongering environmental tours for the PBS News Hour. Monday evening found him embedded in Pacific Northwest ice with a glacier-tracking family in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State.
Substitute anchor Nick Schifrin’s introduction was even more alarmists than Tracy’s excited report from the melting glacier field.
PBS News Hour's Nick Schifrin: "The world's glaciers are receding at an alarming rate, losing more than a trillion tons of ice a year. It's fueled in part by climate change and is driving sea levels higher, which could threaten coastal communities around the world." pic.twitter.com/AgJhtyZfYT
— Clay Waters 🇮🇱 (@claywaters44) June 24, 2026
Nick Schifrin: Finally from us: melting ice. The world's glaciers are receding at an alarming rate, losing more than a trillion tons of ice a year. It's fueled in part by climate change and is driving sea levels higher, which could threaten coastal communities around the world. Special correspondent Ben Tracy of Climate Central found a man who, alongside his family, has seen the melt firsthand every year for nearly half-a-century.
Ben Tracy: But it is stunningly beautiful out here.
Mauri Pelto, Glaciologist, Nichols College: This one, two miles we have done so far today, I mean, that was fun.
Tracy: I'm not complaining. I'm happy to take a walk in a glacier any day. In the rugged North Cascade Mountains of Washington State...
Mauri Pelto: ... my life has been shaped by this ice.
Tracy: ...no one likely knows this glacier better than Mauri Pelto.
Tracy took up the activist rhetoric Schifrin's intro presaged.
Tracy: Climate scientists say warmer summers and drier winters driven by our burning of fossil fuels are accelerating the loss. Seven of the 10 worst years for glacier melt worldwide have happened since 2010, according to Climate Central. Or just ask Mauri Pelto where the ice used to be.
Tuesday’s News Hour shifted the ongoing crisis southward, from Washington glaciers to Georgia farmland, where reporter Paul Solman claimed inconsistent rain was the problem, and “climate change” again the culprit.
With 2026 being the 20th anniversary of the alarmist global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's failed attempt at predicting environmental apocalypse, one would think PBS would be more hesitant to blame "climate change" (the danger formerly known as global warming) for everything on the planet.
Farmer Casey Cox Kerr: ….We're seeing wetter wets and drier dries. And that can be a big challenge with what we're experiencing on the floor.
Reporter Paul Solman: Wetter wets, drier dries. You won't be surprised to hear this has something to do with climate change.
And you won’t be surprised to hear that Solman’s source, the Union of Concerned Scientists, has a liberal agenda that isn't confined to scientific issues, as its political criticism of Georgia’s decision to count ballots by hand demonstrates. The organization has a history of pushing left-wing causes such as opposition to the deployment of a missile defense shield (it even issued a book opposing Reagan’s “Star Wars” program). It was criticized for hysteria over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food supply.
Rachel Cleetus, Union of Concerned Scientists: Climate change is making these more frequent, both the short-duration kinds of droughts that we're seeing in some places, but also the longer megadroughts like the Southwest is experiencing. The unpredictability of it, the extremes, both the droughts and then the whiplash with extreme rainfall events, that makes it very difficult to plan for these kinds of conditions.
Transcripts are available, click “Expand.”
PBS News Hour
6/22/26
7:49:18 p.m. (ET)
Nick Schifrin: Finally from us: melting ice.
The world's glaciers are receding at an alarming rate, losing more than a trillion tons of ice a year. It's fueled in part by climate change and is driving sea levels higher, which could threaten coastal communities around the world.
Special correspondent Ben Tracy of Climate Central found a man who, alongside his family, has seen the melt firsthand every year for nearly half-a-century
Ben Tracy: But it is stunningly beautiful out here.
Mauri Pelto, Glaciologist, Nichols College: This one, two miles we have done so far today, I mean, that was fun.
Ben Tracy: I'm not complaining. I'm happy to take a walk in a glacier any day.
In the rugged North Cascade Mountains of Washington state...
Mauri Pelto: ... my life has been shaped by this ice.
Ben Tracy: ... no one likely knows this glacier better than Mauri Pelto.
….
Ben Tracy: For more than 40 years, Pelto, a glaciologist, has returned to this remote wilderness, the crunch of footsteps in the snow now rivaled by the sounds of melting ice.
Mauri Pelto: It's always melting off. The crevasses are changing. We could hear the water flowing under our feet.
Ben Tracy: Yes, I mean, just standing here, you can hear it just running under our feet.
Mauri Pelto: Yes.
Ben Tracy: Pelto founded the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project in 1984 as a grad student. He vowed to measure these glaciers every summer for 50 years.
So how deep is that?
Mauri Pelto: This is 9.5 feet. So now we just do this over and over again all day long.
Ben Tracy: This is year 42.
How old were you when you decided to do 50 years of this?
Mauri Pelto: I was 22.
Ben Tracy: Twenty-two. How old are you now?
Mauri Pelto: Sixty-three.
Ben Tracy: In that time, the glaciers have changed more than he has, shrinking by 40 percent. Some have disappeared. Pelto's work has been featured by NASA and fed into a worldwide glacier database.
So, of the 47 that you have studied and returned to over and over again, how many are gone?
Mauri Pelto: Twelve of them.
Ben Tracy: Twelve?
Mauri Pelto: Yes, and nine of them just in the last five years.
Ben Tracy: Wow. Climate scientists say warmer summers and drier winters driven by our burning of fossil fuels are accelerating the loss. Seven of the 10 worst years for glacier melt worldwide have happened since 2010, according to Climate Central.
Or just ask Mauri Pelto where the ice used to be.
Mauri Pelto: Almost 50 feet above my head just a decade ago.
Ben Tracy: A decade ago, this glacier would have been 50 feet above your head?
Mauri Pelto: Yes.
Ben Tracy: That much has been lost?
Mauri Pelto: Yes.
Ben Tracy: Glaciers are Earth's water towers, storing 70 percent of the fresh water supply, vital for drinking, farming and the health of many ecosystems. As they melt, sea levels are rising and coastal flooding is getting worse.
PBS News Hour
6/23/26
7:41:39 p.m. (ET)
Amna Nawaz: More than half of the continental U.S. is facing drought. Meanwhile, in just the South this year, tens of millions of people have been under flood watches. These extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops, at a time when they're already facing high production costs.
Paul Solman recently traveled to southern Georgia to hear from some of those farmers. It's part of our continuing series Tipping Point.
Paul Solman: In Southeast Georgia, the Berry family farming for generations, their grandpa a sharecropper, but, this spring, drought.
But your dad said you have never seen a drought like this before.
Cedric Berry, Farmer, Ludowici, Georgia: Right.
Paul Solman: Have you?
Cedric Berry: No, not in my lifetime, I haven't. Never heard of stories of a drought this bad either.
Tony Berry, Farmer, Ludowici, Georgia: If we were to plant on schedule in the heart of the drought, we pretty much would have lost all those crops.
Paul Solman: One hundred and seventy miles west, the opposite problem at the 2,400-acre Longleaf Ridge Farm run by sixth-generation farmer Casey Cox Kerr.
Casey Cox Kerr, Longleaf Ridge Farm: I wanted to come back and build on the foundation that my parents had built.
Paul Solman: She too faces drought, though, her part of Southern Georgia finally did get rain a few weeks ago. But it was a downpour that menaced the crops.
Casey Cox Kerr: It's not only does it drown some of the plants. It also creates disease and pest problems. We're seeing wetter wets and drier dries. And that can be a big challenge with what we're experiencing on the floor.
Paul Solman: Wetter wets, drier dries. You won't be surprised to hear this has something to do with climate change. Rachel Cleetus, Union of Concerned Scientists: It's affecting precisely those things that people defend on for their livelihoods, their food, their water supplies. These are essentials.
Paul Solman: Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Rachel Cleetus: Climate change is making these more frequent, both the short-duration kinds of droughts that we're seeing in some places, but also the longer megadroughts like the Southwest is experiencing. The unpredictability of it, the extremes, both the droughts and then the whiplash with extreme rainfall events, that makes it very difficult to plan for these kinds of conditions.
