It used to be that the weather news was a 2 minute snippet near the end of the local news half-hour, longer if snow was being reported and the resorts got their free plugs. My how things have changed. If the President and his administration don’t get that big things are happening in the clouds and oceans lots of TV viewers do. The Weather Channel is now a full time cable option, sometimes filling the time with scary pictures of hurricanes and tornadoes pitching everything that is supposed to stay earthbound, but more and more, giving us climate change observations, analysis and science. Not a bad place to tune into when the yammerheads are in control of the other channels.
The NY Times had a front Business Page article of some depth about the new turn in climate reporting.
“If The Weather Channel isn’t talking about climate change and global warming, who is?” said Kaye Zusmann, the vice president for program strategy and development for the network. “It’s our mandate.”
The network, which had been gearing up for the opening of hurricane season on Friday, sees the engagement with the issues surrounding climate change as important for content and for business.
“We have a point of view, and we think it’s really important to articulate why it’s happening. Secondarily, it’s good business,” said Ms. Wilson, the network president. “Many consumers want to know, ‘What should I do?’ ”
The lightning rod for controversy, so to speak, is Heidi Cullen, the network’s resident climate expert.
In December, she raised the ire of Fox News and others by writing on her weather.com blog that the American Meteorological Society should not give its “seal of approval” to any meteorologist who “can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change.” (There are now more than 1,700 comments on that one post.)
Dr. Cullen, a tiny woman who speaks with conviction, said she believed that people were “finally seeing climate connected to weather,” but that a lot of information still needs to be disseminated. “If you turn on the local forecast, you wouldn’t necessarily know that global warming exists,” she said.
You can see Cullen’s blog here. You might want to make it a favorite along with Jeff Masters at Weather Underground.