Okay, freelance business reporter Chris Morrison writing on the popular website Bnet doesn’t have the reach of the NY Times. But you have to like his headline compared to the NYT’s, “Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming” (see In yet another journalistic lapse, the NYT once again equates non-scientists “” Bastardi, Coleman, and Watts (!) “” with climate scientists).
And his content and framing is vastly superior also:
… According to George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, some 87 percent of weathercasters also talk publicly about climate change.As you might gather from its name, the Center would be happy with that number if weathercasters also generally believed in climate change “” specifically, anthropogenically-caused global warming. But for the most part, they don’t. Another majority, 63 percent, told George Mason that global warming mostly stems from natural causes, while 27 percent called the entire theory of global warming a “scam”.
The problem, for George Mason (and me; I should note here that I generally accept AGW) is that modern meteorologists combine two qualities: the first is that they’re one of the most skeptical scientific groups toward climate change, following only oil and gas geologists; the second is that they’re probably America’s most visible scientists, by a long shot.
Well, they are mostly sciency-sounding weathercasters, rather than actual scientists. Indeed, only about half of them even have a degree in meteorology.
So it’s possible that weathercasters, with only four-year degrees and no grounding at all in climate studies (a field quite distinct from predicting local weather), are guiding the national dialogue on climate change.
What’s guiding their opinions? Here are a few possibilities:
- The models that meteorologists use can barely predict the weather a few days ahead, so they tend to scoff at models predicting years or decades ahead
- Meteorologist see natural systems as implacable and impossible to affect through human agency
- And like many people, they can confuse localized weather trends with what’s happening on a planetary scale
- Many meteorologists were disgusted by an early attempt from Al Gore to convince them of global warming, and now view it as a political issue
- Although only 17 percent of meteorologists have graduate degrees, most are confident in their ability to judge other sciences
Many of the above reasons come from the Columbia Journalism Review, which just published its own huge article on meteorologists in its January / February issue….
The CJR’s writer, Charles Homans, came to the conclusion that many meteorologists have an earthy confidence in their own intuition. From near the end of his article:
The biggest difference I noticed between the meteorologists who rejected climate science and those who didn’t was not how much they knew about the subject, but how much they knew about how much they knew””how clearly they recognized the limits of their own training.
“¦ when [Fox meteorologist Bob] Breck talked to local schools and Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs about climate change, he presented his own ideas: warming trends were far more dependent on the water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, he told them, and the appearance of an uptick in global temperatures was the result of the declining number of weather stations in cold rural areas. These theories were not only contradictory of each other, but had also been considered and rejected by climate researchers years ago. But Breck didn’t read much climate research”¦
Breck scorned his licensing agency, the American Meteorological Society, which long ago signaled its own support of climate change theory….
Well, it’d be a little more accurate to say that the AMS shares the broad and deep scientific understanding of human-caused climate change, which is based on extensive observation and research — see their statement here: American Meteorological Society reaffirms “that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies”¦.”But overall, kudos to Morrison for out-reporting the NYT.Related Posts:
- Are meteorologists climate experts?
- Joe Bastardi can’t read a temperature anomaly map and so spins another conspiracy theory: Says pre-1978 temperatures use “magic readjustment”
- Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi admits, “Earth continues warmest winter since satellite measurements started”: Then he invents a new, self-contradictory theory of warming.
- Meteorological Malpractice: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi pushes the “70s Ice Age Scare” myth again
- O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”
- Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts
- Must-read NOAA paper smacks down Anthony Watts “” Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”
- Watts not to love: New study finds the poor weather stations tend to have a slight COOL bias, not a warm one”
- Dust Bowl-ification hits Eastern Australia “” next stop the U.S. Southwest. Anti-scientific WattsUpWithThat says it has “nothing to do with the dreaded Climate Change” and “has an unappreciated benefit”!