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This was not the first time I’d found out that March was an abnormally warm month in America. My colleagues at Climate Reality have blogged about the early spring this year. In fact, my own job as a climate solutions analyst involves staying abreast of the latest climate and temperature-related trends. Over the course of March I’d already read about the ecological impacts of an early spring , and I’d checked out the recent study that found that there is a strong link between recent weather extremes and man-made climate change. In addition, I had been tracking high temperatures throughout the last month myself, as well as commentary about this trend by scientists and environmental reporters. But guess what? Being immersed in this information over the last few weeks didn’t make me sit up and pay attention. I suddenly paid attention to the temperature records because someone I am fond of had just talked about them (this is where I make a full confession about being amongst the legion of devoted Sam Champion fans).
Thus, my epiphany yesterday was that messengers are important when it comes to making people care about the impact of climate change – even for people who already understand the science and are working to find solutions to this problem. In fact, TV meteorologists who connect viewers to natural phenomena happening around the country and world are amongst the most trusted messengers.
Now we all know that there’s an important difference between weather and climate, the former being the province of meteorologists and the latter the domain of climatologists (and check out this video for a handy way to remember the difference). Also, we know that most weather forecasters and TV meteorologists are reluctant to talk about climate change because that isn’t their discipline (note that Sam Champion didn’t say anything about climate change yesterday morning, he simply mentioned the number of records). But given the sheer amount of data that many meteorologists have seen over the last few years, more of them are finding themselves extremely concerned, and are now venturing to talk about this important issue.
Does your local TV meteorologist ever mention climate change? Would you like him or her to try to explain connections between weather patterns and larger climate trends? Write a comment below to let us know or send a message to your local TV meteorologist.
Nicholas Brummel
April 4th
None of the local stations directly attributes the record highs, and crazy weather patterns in our area and throughout the nation to climate change. Probably in large part due to Kansas being so ‘ red’. Help them get their acts together!
George P. Meade
April 4th
NASA science and all over the world has made this climate change as Human Caused. Please relate this as Climate Change in your weather reporting because more people would start useing renewables and sustainable changes for our future.
Lenore Kadish
April 4th
Isn’t it time that we start connecting the dots of climate change to man’s ecological impact?!! If our weather reporters would talk about this, maybe people would wake up to THEIR responsibility in the change of our weather … and maybe, just maybe we can start to reverse the damaging patterns. We need to start a real awareness globally! thank you!
Gretchen Williams
April 4th
I notice a lack of climate change mentions from my local Meteorologists. I have wondered if it is political. It would help if the weather scientists would speak up in our everyday lives.
Joan Watson
April 4th
How is this going to affect our summer temps?? Kinda scary imagining how it might!!
Partial Skeptic
April 6th
This article refers to record temperatures since the year 1850. Why aren’t we looking at core sample data from the last 5 interglacial periods starting 900,000 years ago? Depending on the time period, doesn’t that data show considerably higher temperatures and up to 15′ higher sea levels along with considerably lower temperatures and lower sea levels?
Colin
May 19th
It isn’t that easy to link high (or low) temps in one area at any one time with climate change – that’s why we meteorologists don’t do it. Not because “…that isn’t their discipline ”
Point 1 – Every time we make a statement/claim, there is a skeptic out there who will point (as partial skeptic does), that temperatures were higher some millions of years ago. So it confuses the public – which is what some of the skeptics are actually wanting to achieve.
Point 2 – the public don’t notice the climate change taking place, in the same way we don’t notice the tree on our way to work is changing. Most of the time, it isn’t in our line of sight. If we moved away and come back, we are surprised at the change in the tree. Climate change is still taking place largely out of sight.
Point 3 – the public largely adopt an “I’m all right” attitude, until the disaster hits them (as opposed to their neighbour). However, 7500 simultaneous incidents suddenly makes their neighbourhood much closer to home and so *now* they pay attention to what scientists are saying.
Leaders around the world *are* being told about climate change and understanding it – which is why they continue to build renewable energy sources even though some of their voters insist that they stop.
We do need the public to get on message as well and as these big weather events hit home (or close to it) the public *will* waken up and notice that tree is a heck of a lot bigger than a few years ago.