Not only have TV weathercasters been made mostly irrelevant by free iPhone apps, it turns out that many of them are also wrong, wrong, wrong about the most pressing issue of our time, The New York Times reports today.
The Times cites a study that finds 25 percent of weathercasters don’t believe global warming is happening, while two-thirds believe it is caused by natural environmental changes. Do you really want your grandma getting her information from (and falling in love with) these people?
*Except Sam Champion
The study, by George Mason University researchers, also found that 27 percent of survey respondents found agreement with the statement “global warming is a scam.”
It turns out that it boils down to a simmering feud between meteorologists, who look at the atmosphere for short-term changes, and climatologists, who look at it long-term.
Bob Henson, a science writer for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research puts it this way:
In a sense the question is who owns the atmosphere: the people who predict it every day or the people who predict it for the next 50 years?
Henson also claims that meteorologists, who generally have bachelor’s degrees, resent climatologists with doctoral degrees pushing them around.
We’ll pause here and note that some weather anchors, like Good Morning America’s Sam Champion, are concientious reporters on global warming and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But many other weathercasters are following pioneering GMA weather anchor John Coleman, profiled here in the Columbia Journalism Review, in rejecting all those pointy-headed, liberal scientists who are pushing the global warming line.
Coleman was the one who declared climate change is a scam.
This shows once again, that much of the global warming dispute boils down to a dislike of Al Gore and questions about what IPCC head Rajendra K. Pachauri does with his consulting money, not science.