The media over the past week have given a lot of play to a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that claims that Asian pollution is enhancing storms over the Pacific Ocean, with effects extending globally.

We are talking headlines in hundreds of major media sources around the world. As illustrated below, the headlines have been pretty scary. But as I will show below, the PNAS paper really proves no such thing and this situation is another example of unhealthy and counterproductive hype and exaggeration in the media.