Global warming alarmists are crowing about new research showing people in Colorado who lived in areas near the September 2013 floods, but who did not lose property in the floods, have become as alarmist about global warming as people who lost property in the floods.

“These findings may speak to the power of collective experiences, rather than experiences felt independently,” researchers wrote in the journal Climatic Change, as reported in the Colorado Sun.

“My working hypothesis is that human beings are social creatures and we experience a lot of the world through proxy, through what our neighbors, our family, our friends, the media tell is going on,” said author Deserai Crow of the Colorado University Denver School of Public Affairs.

Emphasis, of course, on what “the media tell is going on.”

The difference between scientific evidence and media tall tales is especially apparent regarding alarmist media coverage of the Colorado floods. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found conclusively that the rains that fell on Colorado in September 2013 were neither more likely nor more intense as a result of climate change.

“We found such climate factors had little appreciable effect on the frequency of heavy 5-day rainfall events in this area during September,” said the lead author of the NOAA report, Martin Hoerling, as reported by meteorologist Anthony Watts.

Even the alarmist United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports little confidence in claims that global warming is causing more frequent or severe flooding.

“There is limited to medium evidence available to assess climate-driven observed changes in the magnitude and frequency of floods at regional scales,” states IPCC’s 2018 interim climate report.

“Furthermore, there is low agreement in this evidence, and thus overall low confidence at the global scale regarding even that sign of these changes,” the IPCC report concluded.

Reporting on the flooding perception research by the University of Colorado and Duke researchers, the Colorado Sun’s headline asks, “What will make you believe in global warming? How about a life-altering flood, study asks?”

Or, more likely, how about some science-altering fraudulent media coverage?