Archives for June 14, 2008

All three staff meteorologists at [American] KLTV, the ABC affiliate broadcasting to the Tyler-Longview-Jacksonville area of Northeast Texas, joined forces last November to deliver an on-air rebuttal of the idea that humans are changing the earth’s climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, representing the work of hundreds of scientists from 130 countries, had declared eight months earlier that warming of the atmosphere was “unequivocal” and that greenhouse gases from human activities were “very likely” the cause of most of the warming since the mid-20th century.

The three KLTV weathercasters – appearing in a Nov. 8 story by a station news reporter – let it be known, however, that they were unconvinced.

Meteorologist Grant Dade: “Is the Earth warming? Yes, I think it is. But is man causing that? No. It’s a simple climate cycle our climate goes through over thousands of years.”

Read more of the story by Bill Dawson at ‘The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media’ by clicking here: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/features/0608_tv.htm

Further in the article there is also comment that:

The disagreements between television weathercasters and climate scientists involve “a jurisdictional war,” and “there’s nobody free of sin in this matter,” Knight said. “I’m seeing a row here, but it’s not a bad row.”

On one side, there seems to be “a disdain in the orthodox scientific research community for those who are not smart enough to get a Ph.D. or do research, and instead go into the fluff of television and just forecast the weather,” he said.

On the other side, “there’s a certain amount of disdain from television meteorologists who are predicting the weather for those who pontificate about what their [climate] models show,” he added.

Knight summed up his own view of climate change this way: “There’s no question that warming is going on. To say it’s a hoax is to deny the data. To say it’s all human-caused is foolish, too.”