Why are so many TV weathercasters denier douchebags?

[Viking12]

Hot Air

Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?

By Charles Homans

Coleman’s crusade caught the eye of Kris Wilson, an Emory University journalism lecturer and a former TV news director and weatherman himself, and Wilson got to wondering. He surveyed a group of TV meteorologists, asking them to respond to Coleman’s claim that global warming was a scam. The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.* Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue. “I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,” Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong.

-snip-

There is one little problem with this: most weathercasters are not really scientists. When Wilson surveyed a broader pool of weathercasters in an earlier study, barely half of them had a college degree in meteorology or another atmospheric science. Only 17 percent had received a graduate degree, effectively a prerequisite for an academic researcher in any scientific field.

-snip-

The biggest difference I noticed between the meteorologists who rejected climate science and those who didn’t was not how much they knew about the subject, but how much they knew about how much they knew—how clearly they recognized the limits of their own training. Among those in the former category was Bob Breck, the AMS-certified chief meteorologist at Fox affiliate WVUE in New Orleans and a thirty-two-year veteran of the business. Breck rejected the notion of human-driven climate change wholesale—“I just find that to be quite arrogant,” he told me. Instead, when Breck talked to local schools and Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs about climate change, he presented his own ideas: warming trends were far more dependent on the water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, he told them, and the appearance of an uptick in global temperatures was the result of the declining number of weather stations in cold rural areas.

These theories were not only contradictory of each other, but had also been considered and rejected by climate researchers years ago. But Breck didn’t read much climate research; “the technical journals are controlled by the professors who run the various societies,” he told me, and those professors were hopelessly dependent on the “gravy train of grants from the NSF” that required them to propagate “alarmist theories.” When I mentioned the AMS, Breck bristled. “I don’t need the AMS seal—which I have,” he said. “I don’t need their endorsements. The only endorsements I need are my viewers, and they like what I do.”

http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/hot_air.php?page=all

[joeybee12]

1. Essentially, the dumber you are, the more you deny...n/t

[montanacowboy]

2. And the biggest one is Ron Marciano

at CNN - he makes fun of Al Gore on the air every chance he gets, he is a POS #1 asshole

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. I believe the correct term is “Weather Reader”

Honestly, most of these people are just reading the forecasts from the National Weather Service. Then, they spice them up a little.

The http://www.ametsoc.org/">American Meteorological Society is quite clear on the topic:
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html

Climate Change

An Information Statement of the American Meteorological Society

(Adopted by AMS Council on 1 February 2007) Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 88

http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.pdf">pdf version

The following is an Information Statement intended to provide a trustworthy, objective, and scientifically up-to-date explanation of scientific issues of concern to the public at large.

…

Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond. Focusing on the next 30 years, convergence among emission scenarios and model results suggest strongly that increasing air temperatures will reduce snowpack, shift snowmelt timing, reduce crop production and rangeland fertility, and cause continued melting of the ice caps and sea level rise. Important goals for future work include the need to understand the relation of climate at the state and regional level to the patterns of global climate and to reverse the decline in observational networks that are so critical to accurate climate monitoring and prediction.

…

[damntexdem]

4. Because they're not experts, just talking heads.

And they're hired to say what their masters want said.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. In Alabama, even the State Climatologist is a denier.

http://www.stateclimate.org/state.php?state_id=AL

Try reading down to the last line of this article:
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2009/12/state_climatologist_john_chris.html

[joshcryer]

6. They come from community colleges and are generally uneducated.

They haven't invested their lives in science, they have spent time learning about models that scientists built.

All they do is run the models that come from the NOAA! The National Weather Service predicts weather, they just relay it to the consumer!