Columbia Journalism Review asks “Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?”
Meteorologists are not required to take a course in climate change, this is not part of the NOAA/NWS [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service] certification requirements, so university programs don’t require the course (even if they offer it). So we have been educating generations of meteorologists who know nothing at all about climate change.
Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating article, “Hot Air: Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?“ Because people seem to think they should know something about climate, (anti-science) weathermen get undo attention in the (right-wing) media — see “Meteorological Malpractice: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi pushes the “70s Ice Age Scare” myth again” and “Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”.
Heck, a former TV weatherman has the most popular anti-science website in the world, WattsUpWithThat. And of course, Weather Channel Founder John Coleman, a subject of the CJR piece, asserted in 2007 that global warming is “the greatest scam in history,” which puts him in the conspiracy wing of the disinformers with the now discredited Anthony Watts. [Doesn't everyone know that the greatest scam in history is the whole moon-landing nonsense?]
The answer to the question, “Are meteorologists climate experts?” is “no,” or I should say, “not inherently.” That’s clear from the CJR story (excerpted below) and from the opening quote of this post, which comes from an interview I did a few years ago with Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. [Yes, that Judith Curry, who wrote "an open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research"].
I originally asked the question in 2007 when Coleman wrote that now-infamous article claiming global warming is “the greatest scam in history,” and explained the source of his conspiracy theory:
I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.
Oh well, then, case closed. A weatherman read a bunch of papers and thought about them.
In fact, asking a meteorologist to opine on the climate is like asking your family doctor what the chances are for an avian flu pandemic in the next few years or asking a mid-West sheriff the prospects for nuclear terrorism. The answer might be interesting, but not one you should stake your family’s life on, let alone the lives of billions of people.
As but one example of how meaningless it is to read a few scientific papers “” especially the wrong ones “” consider what Coleman said on CNN’s Glenn Beck:
When I looked at the hockey stick graph “¦ it showed a steady [declining] temperature throughout the millenium and then a sudden rise, I knew that that was incorrect. I knew it couldn’t possibly be. “¦ And I found out it was bogus science. It wasn’t real. The numbers had been massaged. The whole thing had been created.
Uhh, no. The scientific literature is very clear “” the hockey stock is not bogus science. Indeed, the nation’s most prestigious scientific body, the National Academies of Science, has issued a pretty definitive statement about this, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, which is discussed here. And here is New Scientist on the myth the hockey stick graph has been proven wrong.
Yet even more important than the fact that the original analysis was defensibly correct, is that the conclusions were correct [which could be true even if the analysis had flaws in it]. Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium? Try two millennia (see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years“). See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, ‘seminal’ study finds“:
You don’t need to be a climate scientist to talk about climate science “” but you do need to have a thorough grounding in the actual scientific literature, as opposed to just the (much smaller, and rarely peer-reviewed) anti-science literature. If you insist on repeating long-debunked disinformer myths “” attacking the hockey stick, and the like “” then you become a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS) and lose all credibility, like Watts and Coleman.
Coleman says:
In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped”¦. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.
Sadly, if enough policymakers and opinion makers keep listening to Coleman, then that will ensure we stay on the high end of the emissions trajectory — and that just about guarantees the business-as-usual climate impact predictions, aka Hell and High Water and possibly even the worst-case scenario (see UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon”).
CJR makes a number of similar points about Coleman’s anti-science crusade:
None of it would have had much of an impact, but for Coleman’s r©sum©. For the many Americans who don’t understand the difference between weather””the short-term behavior of the atmosphere””and climate””the broader system in which weather happens””Coleman’s professional background made him a genuine authority on global warming. It was an impression that Coleman encouraged. Global warming “is not something you ‘believe in,’” he wrote in his essay. “It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise.”
Except that it wasn’t. Coleman had spent half a century in the trenches of TV weathercasting; he had once been an accredited meteorologist, and remained a virtuoso forecaster. But his work was more a highly technical art than a science. His degree, received fifty years earlier at the University of Illinois, was in journalism. And then there was the fact that the research that Coleman was rejecting wasn’t “the science of meteorology” at all””it was the science of climatology, a field in which Coleman had spent no time whatsoever.
Certainly, not every meteorologist is uninformed about climate science (see “Weather Channel expert on Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge“). But CJR notes how epidemic anti-science views are among TV meteorologists:
Coleman’s crusade caught the eye of Kris Wilson, an Emory University journalism lecturer and a former TV news director and weatherman himself, and Wilson got to wondering. He surveyed a group of TV meteorologists, asking them to respond to Coleman’s claim that global warming was a scam. The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman””not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.* Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century””half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue. “I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,” Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong…..
More striking is the fact that the weathercasters became outspoken in their rejection of climate science right around the time the rest of the media began to abandon the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach that had dominated their coverage of the issue for years, and started to acknowledge that the preponderance of evidence lay with those who believed climate change was both real and man-made. If anything, that shift radicalized the weathermen. “I think the media is almost sleeping with the enemy,” one meteorologist told me. “The way it is now, there is just such a bias as to what gets out.”
And yet weathermen remain trusted by the public in spite of their lack of actual qualifications:
In the fall of 2008, researchers from George Mason and Yale universities conducted the most fine-grained survey to date about what Americans know and think about climate change….
When asked whom they trusted for information about global warming, 66 percent of the respondents named television weather reporters. That was well above what the media as a whole got, and higher than the percentage who trusted Vice-President-turned-climate-activist Al Gore, either of the 2008 presidential nominees, religious leaders, or corporations. Scientists commanded greater credibility, but only 18 percent of Americans actually know one personally; 99 percent, by contrast, own a television. “Meteorology benefits from the fact that we’re just about the only science that has an individual in people’s living rooms every night,” says Keith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society. “For many people, it’s the only scientist whose name they know.”
There is one little problem with this: most weathercasters are not really scientists. When Wilson surveyed a broader pool of weathercasters in an earlier study, barely half of them had a college degree in meteorology or another atmospheric science. Only 17 percent had received a graduate degree, effectively a prerequisite for an academic researcher in any scientific field.
This is but one reason — among many — about why the public, especially conservatives, remain uninformed and disinformed about global warming (see “No wonder polling shows more people don’t know the scientific evidence that humans are warming the Earth has grown stronger”).
And yet, for all the misinformation and disinformation they are exposed to, the public still want very much wants government-led action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions:
- Yet another poll shows Americans support the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill “” and know the planet is warming “” even in face of anti-science noise machine
- Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks
- It’s all about Independents “” and Independence
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
It is worth mentioning again that not all “weathermen” are “meteorologists”, as in not everyone who presents the weather in the media has studied the science like in getting a degree in meteorology/atmospheric science. I did not check into the details of the linked studies, but I had thought the numbers were higher for degreed meteorologists and so was a bit surprised. Still many indeed do “get it”, but it is depressing since so many do not, and such people may be the only connection to many in the public with atmospheric science.
Besides the weatherman (even the one with the solid science background) not necessarily being well-educated on climate in general, I think many meteorologists conflate weather prediction and projections for climate similar to how many in the general public do. Weather prediction has been steadily improving, but there is still plenty of uncertainty, and I believe many meteorologists simply incorrectly sort of assume that there cannot be much certainty in climate projections.
It may be like if a sailor doubted rising sea levels simply because he spends all his time on oceans with storms, swells, waves, and still water – as those are what he well knows, he simply did not bother to think that there are other ways to know sea level is rising than by looking over the edge of the boat.
It makes some sense that the public trusts the weatherman on climate (yes, even in spite of all the “only job where you can always be wrong” quips) like was noted more than any politician, even Gore. It would be nice to be able to utilize that trust. That points toward a strategy of highlighting the lack of credibility of the lost like John Coleman and hopefully getting those who understand the science to teach it at least some.
Meteorologists who think they will lose credibility talking about climate change because it is politicized should consider that if they explained it then it may become less politicized. Also, their not talking about it can lend credence in people’s minds that it is not a relevant issue.
undue attention.
To best understand television, you must know about the consulting services of Frank Magid Associates – just about every TV station will get consulting from them. Until Magid says it is OK to talk climate during the weather segment, it is not going to happen.
http://www.magid.com/consulting/local_television/index.asp
TV weather forecasters are professionals that serve a highly competitive broadcasting business model. The TV business pulls in advertising from so many businesses that are connected carbon consumption – every automobile ad, oil company ad, even travel are all vested heavily in the lie. They are required to ignore the science, it is just a business decision.
That is just the way it is.
This post might want to distinguish between meteorologists who actually have a science degree (although, as this post indicates, it has no requirement for climate science knowledge), and TV weather presenters, which doesn’t require a science degree, although some have one. I personally don’t think the term “meteorologist” should be given to those without a science degree. It gives the wrong impression. Would we call someone with a journalism degree only a climatologist or a physicist?
As for the question, my answer would be a combination of
- a general lack of expertise
- TV weather presenters are engaged with short-term forecasting. They can easily fall victim to fallacy that because it’s hard to forecast weather, a week out, it must be impossible to figure out where the climate is headed. It hot some days and cold other days. There are record highs and record lows. They are focused often on local areas where annual standard deviation is very high, fooling them into thinking a much below average year or month is evidence of a scam.
- the fact that TV weather presenters often like the attention one gets being in front of the camera on a regular basis. Global warming deniers also like attention and the relative fame that one gets by being contrarian on an issue that is politically-charged. Bastardi wouldn’t get national attention on Fox News if he wasn’t engaged in denialist rhetoric.
I just read gmo’s (#1) post. Sorry for the repeated points.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media has a review of Coleman’s latest performance art:
‘Extraordinary Claims’ in KUSI Broadcast
On NOAA, NASA … but ‘Extraordinary Evidence’?
Richard Pauli educated me here. It didn’t even occur to me that TV station advertiser relationships extended to the weathermen. I had been under the impression that the weatherman was always the cheesy backwater of television journalism, a failed actor handwaving spastically, with a horrible wardrobe. Turns out, apparently, that this was deliberate.
We shouldn’t underestimate the Anthony Wattses of the world, though. He’s a joke to anyone who knows anything about climate science, but he has a huge following, and is even quoted by apparently serious people. If you read his blog, his comments would sound sensible to someone who didn’t know anything about the science.
I think “weatherman deniers” could be a good humor piece, featuring Mr. Watts. The whole denier industry is a very rich field for humor, and needs to be mined more often. I laughed through Climate Coverup, even though that was not their intention. These guys are, after all, ridiculous. The fact that they are doing so much damage just makes it funnier in a way- kind of like the George C Scott and Sterling Hayden characters in Dr. Strangelove. Very crazy, but dead serious about their work.
Columbia Journalism Review asks “Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?”
What great irony! The answer is perhaps due to idiotic decisions like Columbia’s removal of environmental reporting in their journalism curriculum.
Hail to the masses, the messes and the masters. Where’s my water bucket?
Hey Joe!
This is a little off topic for this thread, but Andy Revkin has a recent post citing a study predicting that hurricanes will be less frequent but more intense in a warmed world:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/warming-seen-to-cut-atlantic-hurricane-tally-but-boost-threat/#more-13523
Since I don’t consider Revkin the most authoritative source on these issues, I’d love to read something from you on what the science really says about hurricanes and warming, and how hurricane activity of the past decade squares with those predictions.
Thanks for everything you do here!
Argumentum ad Vericundiam http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html
“I’m not a climatologist, but I play one on TV …”
There are some good texts — some of which are now over 100 years old — that argue that scientific method is simply critical thinking refined. So the less people know and practice critical thinking generally, the less they are able to grasp scientific method specifically.
(3rd attempt)
re Magid – wow. Thank you Richard Pauli for this; not that it’s welcome news.
I wonder if he’s really telling them to raise doubts about the science…I’ll check.
re Watts, and education – does anybody know anyone who was in the Meteorology dept at Purdue, circa 1980, who might be able to clarify whether Watts was really there?
(I don’t think he graduated, but there’ve been statements in print that he attended. See his SourceWatch page for details…)
Reading a weather prediction on television is not science, though our society is often confused about that fact and for some reason believes that weathermen are scientists.
re Anna’s query (#11),
Any Purdue grad could probably check the alumni directory to verify.
From the Reno News Review online:
“After not getting re-elected to the local school board last November, Watts found himself with time to indulge his curiosity about climate change. He thought back to 1978, when he was a student working in a lab at Purdue University and was asked to repaint the wood box around the mercury thermometer used to gauge the air temperature. He had to use whitewash, the coating used when the first “Stevenson screens” (as the boxes are called) got built.”
I suspect one issue here may be that many older television meteorologists received their university training from faculty who were older yet and thus were behind the curve on modeling, particularly GCM models and the differences that arose between GCM and weather models over time.
For that matter, many present meteorology faculty may have received the same anachronistic perspective when they themselves were being educated and could still be cultivating some outdated perspectives in their students.
This chapter from Weart’s book thoroughly describes this creeping divergence in models:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm
If you went to school at the wrong time or have an influential instructor who has not kept up, you might end up in the weeds. Strange as it may seem, some of these folks are probably acting out of habit as opposed to sheer cussedness.
I doubt that even the weatherman that have advanced degrees have taken any graduate level paleoclimatology courses. Without the context of longer term tectonic and orbital changes that influence climate, I don’t see how anyone can claim to examine papers on anthropogenic global warming and draw truly usable conclusions from them.
Yall don’t get out enough; it gets goofier. Coleman recently gave a long interview to a syndicated, paranormal radio program whose host (himself the subject of one of the internet’s most notorious parody sites) pushes a Texas-based bulk seed company because “the global warming hoax” could wipe out the world’s food supply. In other ads the host insists the global warming hoax could end all life as we know it. Bill Hicks once explained this type of mentality with a joke about why extraterrestrials always land in tiny Southern communities. To which I can only add: when the mother ship comes to rescue us will they require thumb prints?
Incidentally, in the Texas city where I live one of the best known television weathermen is a longtime meteorology professor at a major university. Another left television to become a senior hydrologist for the river authority. We are lucky to have a number of other weathermen with lengthy and relevant science backgrounds. All of them stick with forecasting short-term weather and leave global warming to the experts. Of course, bear in mind that global warming deniers are hard to find in these parts. Here in AG country it is impossible to deny.
Joe,
Off topic – I was wondering if you had any clips from the Massey/Blankenship v. Kennedy ‘debate’ on mountaintop removal at the Univ. of Charleston.
My #2 was a typo correction for the second paragraph. Should have said so.
The post on wind seems to have trouble accepting comments. Could you check? Thanks.
Bearing in mind that a niche is the collection of resources needed to reproduce effectively (see Richard Dawkins, The Expanded Phenotype), it might be said that cultural evolution has an interesting new feature that goes beyond biological principles. It might be called the counter-niche. Bulls and bears in the stock market, etc.
Create a widespread new niche (say, global warming”) and you may well create the space for a counter-niche (“global warming is a scam”). Knowing that the media love it and will happily assist in its reproduction, the business-as-usual interests will fund it. Hustlers know this and see it as a legal field of employment, compared to conning confused seniors to hand over their savings. Politicians know that counter-niche soundbites will get them air time back home. Where there is ignorance, it can be exploited.
Some of anti-science syndrome (ASS) is simply the exploitation of this newly-created counter-niche. But there are other causes too, as when the knowledge of physicians gets overridden by anti-vaccine fears with little basis in fact. Both scientists and physicians have to expect that some of what they advise will be distorted or denied.
Oops, make that Dawkins’ Extended Phenotype.
I would ask the same of a weatherman, meteorologist. They have been presented with models and forcasts that are so huge in error. They have had a lot of belly laughs in what physicists and math gurus claim that never happened.
Just in January this year, the finest at The Met Office was slow and wrong. Should the Met Office be disqualified?
Bob Ryan of Washington DC’s Channel 4 believes TV weatherman have a professional responsibility to cover global warming but only if they know the science and leave out political slants. He has put together a set of papers on-line to explain climate science to the public.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/03/bob_ryan_weighs_in_on_climate.html
Ryan has a strong education in science, unlike many TV forecasters.
Actually, I wouldn’T discount the Athnoy Wattses of this world. Without his surfacestation project, we might have never known about the reliability of US surface weather stations. Thanks to his efforts, a new scientific study has established that the readings of the surface stations are robust. -> http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf
They go on to acknowledge Watts and his team of volunteers for their effort – even though the results are are slightly different from what they hoped for. So thanks, Anthony!
ps. Any bets on WUWT covering this in a headline? No, I don’t think so either.
The TV meteorologists who get climate change the most include:
Stu Ostro of the Weather Channel. He’s not on-air often, he’s one of their senior meteorologists. Though he’s not done official graduate-level work, his “Ostro Hypothesis” about how global warming appears to be created more 500 mb events that create huge high-pressure ridges (like the one over the Arctic in December and earlier this month) can have corresponding cut-off lows (like the persistent cold snaps at the same time) is a landmark piece of science he’s working to publish with Stephen Bennett at Scripps. Both are extremely honest and candid about the fact that they were deniers until a few years ago – they are both extremely smart, communicate brilliantly and should be supported at every turn. Ostro has received death threats against himself and his family since his Saul to Paul-like conversion.
Dan Satterfield in Huntsville, Alabama. A dynamite forecaster and he gets the totality of climate change as well as anyone I know who is not a climate scientist per se. The four on this list read climate science journals and the other scientific literature continually, understand and can report it as our outstanding host here also does and can – we need this more than anything!
Paul Gross in Detroit, also a great communicator, candid, strong. Same as above.
Bob Ryan, Washington D.C. – He’s been referenced above.
These four and others are in an e-mail group I’m in that came out of the AMS Short Course on Climate Change last June. There are many top NOAA and other climate scientists also on the list. It is a prototype for what I’m working to do more often, with Climate Progress the best one-stop shopping for all of this that there is, when scientific accuracy, accessibility, humor, insight, energy insights, full-cost accounting and honest advocacy are all considered. (And all of this from Joe himself!)
So I’ve thought about this question a lot. Some things we need to understand:
TV Meteorologists are under tremendous amounts of pressure to keep their jobs and hair (most can’t have the former without the latter), move up the food chain to larger markets and be right about their forecasts.
Also they’re given very finite amounts of time and they’ll get in trouble with many viewers, advertisers and station managers if they mention climate change too often.
That said, we need to work to change all this.
It is not enough to mention climate change in the most timid, incomplete way for a minute or few minutes at a time to occasional school or other audiences.
We need to develop sentences TV meteorologists can slip into their forecasts, such as:
“This is the third month of severe drought in our region. This is the fourth severe drought we’ve had in the last 15 years. This is part of a trend climate scientists think is likely to increase, with quite possibly worse droughts to come.”
“This sets a record for the number of 100-degree (or 90) days in the past year, a trend climate scientists think is likely to increase.”
“This was a strong cold snap by current standards, but we haven’t come within 20 degrees of our all-time record low.”
“These kinds of dramatic precipitation events are what climate scientsts project are increasing over time because global warming means more evaporation off the oceans, more water vapor and energy in the atmosphere that has to be released some time and in some way with events like we’ve just experienced. Oddly these events are expected to punctuate longer and more severe droughts, especially in places susceptible to drought like we are.”
Then we and the AMS and NOAA and NCAR, etc need to applaud and encourage whenever a TV meteorologist does slip in a sentence like any of these. We need to reward them and watch them and not their denier (likely Fox) competitors, buy what we need from their advertisers and not their denier competitors, e-mail the station managers and producers and TV meteorologists and applaud them whenever they mention sound science and do the opposite to those who do not or who slip in denier comments.
And we need to do each of these things times a billion.
This “Weathermen tend to deny” thing seems to be general – the same thing happens here in France, and then the deniers can enjoy citing weathermen as “well-known scientists say Warming isn’t real”…
If the AMS is with the program, scientifically speaking, but many weathercasters brandishing their (obsolete) AMS Seals of Approval still aren’t, why doesn’t the AMS rescind their Seal of Approval?
As it is, the AMS is not walking the walk.
Richard Brenne says: January 22, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Further to your thoughts, if you should hear misinformation broadcast by a local forecaster, send a polite letter or email to that person with an authoritatively sourced correction. Refuse to engage in a debate, just cogently make your point and leave it hanging. Be sure to include a compliment of some kind for the presenter; it is impossible to exaggerate the titanic egos of on-air personalities. If you get a rude reply, copy all the correspondence to station management without further ado.
This will be of limited utility w/a national broadcast but on a local level it can help to improve matters.
I say this with a grain of experience because in a former career I worked in radio broadcasting, always at stations with news and opinion as part of programing, and it was my occasional duty to deal with listener feedback. It never ceased to amaze me how relatively little correspondence we received at the various places I worked compared to the many thousands of listeners for whose ears our advertisers and underwriters paid. That being the case, such civil and well reasoned letters as we did receive enjoyed inordinate attention.
One final caution: aggressive or arrogant communications usually ended up being passed around for laughs prior to being binned or worst case stuck on a bulletin board to be mocked.
re Brenne’s “the AMS Short Course on Climate Change last June….”
Yale climate media forum writeup on it here, if others are interested.
From the Yale climate media forum writeup on last year’s AMS Short Course on Climate Change, it sounds like the distinction between meteorologists and weathercasters is “those latter having no formal meteorology degree and credentials”.
is this correct?
If so, it would seem to make Mr. Watts just a weathercaster.
To paint the majority of meteorologists with a broad brush as buffoons who are incapable of understanding climate science is a bit harsh.
As one who has a bachelor of science degree in meteorology myself, I can attest that during my education I had the opportunity to avail myself of many climate modelling courses in university, as well as access to several world class professors doing valuable research. This combined with courses in atmospheric chemistry, numerical modelling, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to name a few gives the average layman a feel that these were certainly not “basket weaving” type courses.
I think that anyone with a meteorology degree has a solid grounding in the basics, which then comprises a good foundation and background level to be capable of actually reading and understanding a technically challenging and jargon filled paper in a reputable peer reviwed science journal like “Nature” or “Science”.
In my opinion, anyone with a science degree in ANY discipline should be capable of careful, thoughtful reasoning and well-versed in the scientific method…If they’re not, they have no business calling themselves a scientist…
A nice quote from the paper by Menne et al that JasonW (24) refers to above:
Given the now extensive documentation by surfacestations.org (Watts [2009]) that the exposure characteristics of many USHCN stations are far from ideal, it is reasonable to question the role that poor exposure may have played in biasing CONUS temperature trends. However,our analysis and the earlier study by Peterson [2006] illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photos and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be evaluated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.
Ha!
32. Dean: “To paint the majority of meteorologists with a broad brush as buffoons who are incapable of udnerstanding climate science is a bit harsh.”
It is unclear to me that that is what is happening above. Pointing out the irrefutably obvious point that a meteorologist lacks the expertise to pontificate on the subject of climate science is scarcely the same thing.
Persons who lack expertise but insist on making declarative announcements that are predicated upon an authority that they do not possess are committing an informal logical fallacy, the argumentum ad vericundiam or “argument from false or misleading authority” http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html.
As the article above fairly clearly describes, there is a significant body of persons with a background in meteorology who pose that background as a basis of authority upon which the are authoritatively qualified to pass legitimate judgments upon the scientific findings of climate researchers. Their doing so is a bald-faced argumentum ad vericundiam.
Now, I’ve taken graduate level courses relating to differential geometry, but that does not make me a researcher in physical cosmology. At best it qualifies me to accurately report what real researchers in the field have come up with. (A qualification which a very few people in the peer-review process agree with, since I’ve actually published on the subject. I’ve some legitimate authority in the areas of logic, critical thinking, and philosophy of science.)
However, an undergraduate class in physics (of which I’ve had a few) does not make me a physicist. By the same token, an undergraduate class in climate science — WHICH IS MERELY AN OPTION, NOT A REQUIREMENT for students of meteorology — does not qualify said students as experts. It would not qualify them as experts even if said class was a requirement. (And, of course, it is still not, in general, even required.)
So yes, any thoughtful person with integrity can, with varying degrees of success, accurately report the facts as established by actual researchers — Al Gore is a nice example of this, both for his successes and his failures. But no such person, with no more established expertise than what you describe, is in any position to pass a scientifically legitimate judgment on the subject.
But such illegitimate judgments are exactly what we are seeing, from persons who will pose as experts on a subject in which they have no legitimate authority what-so-ever. This is not a blanket condemnation of meteorologists; it is a blanket condemnation of poseurs, some of whom use their standing as a “meteorologist” to mask their ignorance with a veil of authority that they do not possess and have done nothing to genuinely earn.
I’ve been involved in several projects to bring on air weathercasters up to speed on climate change. It seems that most of those who repeat the silly things you see on the web have very little background in meteorology, much less climate science.
That said the AMS now has the CBM seal that basically requires a degree in Meteorology to obtain for new entrants into the TV side of the profession. (AMS Seal holders could (and many did) upgrade to the CBM with less requirements)
Among those with a college degree in Meteorology there are far fewer skeptics, and among those of us doing TV with a graduate degree the number of skeptics is much smaller.
I frequently tell colleagues that are skeptical to “take the time” to read the science and they will very likely change their minds. Most who do take the time to really look at it and get their questions answered lose most of that skepticism.
I certainly still cringe when I hear some of the farcical statements of some weather presenters.
I try hard everyday not to say anything foolish about anything, much less weather or climate! Many I suspect will regret some of their comments once they really look at it. I sure did.
Viewers should rightly question the background of anyone giving them science information, whether it be the 7 day forecast or 70 year forecast.
Dan Satterfield
Chief Meteorologist
WHNT TV Huntsville AL
#33: Nice paper, isn’t it? I would love to see the Reverend’s answer to this, whether he will stubbornly persist in denial or accept those results.
Really great comments here, especially from Doug Bostrom (#15 and #29) and Logic Deferred (#34) and of course Dan and Anna just above.
Dan, do most stations have unspoken pressure from the Station Manager and affiliate owner and advertisers and producers not to mention climate change too often?
What would it take to allow TV mets to mention some of the kinds of things I suggest (#26) above? How can we change the entire culture of the loop so that the context (which I typically find missing from most TV news stories)of climate change in many weather broadcasts can be appropriately communicated?
And I think I’d judge anyone communicating climate change by how much they understand, how accurate they are, and how well they communicate, and while a meteorology degree might help with that, it shouldn’t be a prerequisite in and of itself.
For instance, those who communicate climate change the best include Joe Romm, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Korten, Mark Lynas, Ross Gelbspan, James Lovelock, Eban Goodstein and Toby Dittrich, and none has any degrees in atmospheric science that I know of.
Romm, Lovelock and Dittrich are scientists, but the first six are also journalists (Gore in his background and in the Army in Vietnam, Romm here – and reading his mother’s account of Woodstock I can see where Romm gets his excellent journalistic sense).
So TV mets should quote and popularize what the top climate scientists (okay, except Dick Lindzen) know but if like John Coleman or Anthony Watts they pretend to more than all the IPCC Report Group Leaders and Lead Authors combined, then they’ve become Ted Knight-caricatures and mere bloated, windbag know-nothing-know-it-alls, and if I want that I’ll listen to Sarah Palin.
Having at least one TV Weatherman in my area who doesn’t think that greenhouse gas human caused global warming is true, I’ve always wondered about that myself. But to what degree is it that TV Weatherman think it is true and compared to other like professions. What percentage of all Scientists? And each discipline? Is it only those Weatherman who speak out and are atracting attension that you are commenting on?
Ronald, great question I’ve thought about and looked into a lot. Preliminary guesses of the percentage of people who believe humans are contributing to global warming as the IPCC asserts:
Working, published (in peer-reviewed journals) climate change scientists with PhDs: 97%.
Meteorologists as above (they focus on natural variability) with PhDs: 85%
Other working meteorologists with BS degrees: 60%.
TV weathercasters without meteorology degrees: 30%.
Geologists as above (they see tremendous natural changes in geologic time) with PhDs: 80%.
Other geologists: 60%.
Publishing biologists and chemists with PhDs: 95%.
Publishing physcists (they’re seriously smart) with PhDs: 98%.
I have officially and rigorously pulled these figures out of my backside. But I’ve looked into this as much as anyone I know. I’d love to hear other estimates.
Really great comments here, especially from Doug Bostrom (#15 and #29) and Logic Deferred (#34) and of course Dan and Anna just above.
Dan, do most stations have unspoken pressure from the Station Manager and affiliate owner and advertisers and producers not to mention climate change too often?
What would it take to allow TV mets to mention some of the kinds of things I suggest (#26) above? How can we change the entire culture of the loop so that the context (which I typically find missing from most TV news stories)of climate change in many weather broadcasts can be appropriately communicated?
And I think I’d judge anyone communicating climate change by how much they understand, how accurate they are, and how well they communicate, and while a meteorology degree might help with that, it shouldn’t be a prerequisite in and of itself.
For instance, those who communicate climate change the best include Joe Romm, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Korten, Mark Lynas, Ross Gelbspan, James Lovelock, Eban Goodstein and Toby Dittrich, and none has any degrees in atmospheric science that I know of.
Romm, Lovelock and Dittrich are scientists, but the first six are also journalists (Gore in his background and in the Army in Vietnam, Romm here – and reading his mother’s account of Woodstock I can see where Romm gets his excellent journalistic sense).
So TV mets should quote and popularize what the top climate scientists (okay, except Dick Lindzen) know but if like John Coleman or Anthony Watts they pretend to more than all the IPCC Report Group Leaders and Lead Authors combined, then they’ve become Ted Knight-caricatures and mere bloated, windbag know-nothing-know-it-alls, and if I want that I’ll listen to Sarah Palin.
Richard Brenne (“I have officially and rigorously pulled these figures out of my backside”), I know that’s not your only source, since I’ve seen some of these #s elsewhere. It would be great to have a compilation like this with references.
(then it’d be great to have it in a place where people searching for this info could find it; where would that be? Not Wikipedia, it’s too vulnerable there… and what would you google for, to find it?)
On weather vs. climate models, and Doug Bostrom #15‘s “This chapter from Weart’s book thoroughly describes this creeping divergence…” – I read much of the chapter and didn’t grasp (or get to?) the explanation, but Steve Easterbrook has a great week-ago post, Initial value vs. boundary value problems, clarifying the weather vs. climate modeling distinction.
Great idea, Anna (#39) – could you be the lead author of this study?
Anna (#39) – Great idea! How about you as lead author?
me as lead author – no problem, if we have a good place to put it that isn’t like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or out in the street where it can get run over like Wikipedia. No point in putting energy into something that won’t be found.
So. Where?