So, let’s say, for instance, that Wendy Storm is your typical yackety and adorable on-air meteorologist at a station in — I don’t know — Kalamazoo. She’s cheerful, she’s bubbly, she’s easy on the eyes and she can speak in complete sentences. She doesn’t always nail tomorrow’s forecast, but the viewers like her and everybody knows this forecasting business is pretty dicey anyway, so they allow for the usual mistakes.
But there’s a dark side to pretty Wendy in that she’s not enthusiastically preaching global warming dogma to the viewing masses. In fact, one time, when one of the news anchorpersons asked her on the air about global warming, she expressed a bit of uncertainty about its cause and failed to blame it all on mankind. According to Heidi Cullen, Wendy is a climatological apostate, her AMS Seal needs to get yanked and the rest of her career might be better spent reporting live from the scene of apartment fires and traffic pile-ups.
Here‘s what it comes down to. You say you’re an average citizen who’d like to hear what the many global warming skeptics have to say? Sorry about that, but the debate’s over, it’s already been settled. Heidi Cullen, Al Gore and the rest of the gang down at Doom-mongers & Co. had the last word and they’re not interested in hearing any more. Everybody else, particularly professional meteorologists, needs to pipe down — or else. Or else what? Or else they might never work in this business again.
Doesn’t seem particularly open-minded, does it? Not when you consider there’s plenty of good reason to maintain at least a modicum of healthy skepticism. Just for starters, if we hark back to the 1970s, it had pretty much become climatological gospel that sometime in the not-too-distant future the earth would be entering a new ice age. In fact, many scientists were so certain that one of them made this now laughable statement: “We simply cannot afford to gamble. We cannot risk inaction. The scientists who disagree are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored.”
Sound familiar? Funny thing is, the predictions in the ’70s of a new ice age went out almost as fast as disco and leisure suits. Now the current outlandish doomsday forecast is for exactly the opposite result. Do you believe the science of climate change prediction has come so far in 30 years that it should now unhesitatingly be trusted? If you do, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Article comments
1 - Martin Williams
"meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming . . ."
- true.
Not sure why so much brouhaha over this; seems to be too much suppression of scientific discussion by politically misguided pundits.
2 - Dave Nalle
I was wondering how long it would be before someone on BC covered this. Glad to see the article.
And Martin, trying to keep meteorologists who question climate theory is ALSO suppression of scientific disucssion.
Dave
3 - Deano
Oh, please spare us the hyperbole. One person on The Weather Channel blogs about her opinion on the AMS and global warming and you claim a McCarthy-like atmosphere is crushing poor dissident meteorologists...
Give me a break. If I recall the Bush administration flunkies were acting far more McCarthist in discouraging government scientists from speaking out on subjects the Bushies did not agree with - global warming, the Big Bang etc.