Peter Schorsch
The Weather Channel is moving beyond cold fronts and heat waves to wade into the politics of climate change, with a special planned for early next month that includes interviews with nine presidential candidates on the topic.
The campaign’s most prominent climate change skeptic — President Donald Trump — declined an invitation to participate.
The hour-long special, scheduled to debut Nov. 7, interviews candidates at various sites chosen to illustrate the impact of climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, speaks at the site of a devastating California wildfire and Sen. Kamala Harris along a flood-prone area of the Mississippi River.
The Weather Channel has done specials on the impact of climate change in Alaska and along the Louisiana coast, for example, but this is the first time the network has gotten involved directly in a political campaign.
“It gets the conversation going in a big way,” said Rick Knabb, the network’s on-air hurricane expert and former director of the National Hurricane Center. He and meteorologist Stephanie Abrams traded off on the interviews.
The Weather Channel wanted to do the special through its own scientific lens, said Nora Zimmett, the network’s senior vice president for content and programming. Although other networks inquired about joining and doing a town hall-style event, TWC turned them down.
“We didn’t want to have a food fight about whose plan is better,” she said.
While the special is something new for the network, Zimmett said executives weren’t concerned about turning off weather fans who view it as a refuge from politics, or people like the president who see less urgency in addressing the issue. Despite a “vocal minority,” surveys show most viewers want to learn more about the issue and potential solutions, she said.
Trump may not be there, but the special won’t ignore him or what his administration has been doing, Knabb said.
Trump recently mocked Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter for a United Nations speech to world leaders and skipped a UN meeting on the issue.
All three announced Republican challengers to Trump — Joe Walsh, former Illinois congressman, Bill Weld, former Massachusetts governor, and Mark Sanford, former South Carolina governor and congressman — are interviewed. For time reasons, organizers chose the top seven Democrats in the polls: in addition to Sanders and Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Former Vice President Joe Biden was not interviewed; his campaign said it was a scheduling issue.
Knabb said the interviews have taught him a lot about the complexities of proposed solutions.
“The public is going to learn a lot from this,” he said.
The Weather Channel’s show is separate from the Covering Climate Now initiative, which encouraged news organizations to do more stories on climate change. There’s been some criticism that the issue hasn’t received enough attention during the presidential debates.
“We’ve been lonely here on these issues,” Zimmett said, “and all we can do is hope that our friends at other media outlets join us.”
4 comments
richard burcik
October 22, 2019 at 8:35 am
Subject: Anthropogenic climate change has been falsified
Recently, on June 28, 2019, a scholarly journal that is maintained by the top-ranked journal Nature published a scientific research paper, titled “Intensified East Asian Winter Monsoon During the Last Geomagnetic Reversal Transition” by a group of Japanese scientists which found according to its lead investigator that “The umbrella effect caused by galactic cosmic rays is important when thinking about current global warming, as well as, the warm period of the medieval era.” When the journal Nature is willing to print such a contradictory piece of research it is clear that the science is in a state of flux. This remarkable finding confirmed the result found by Profs. Kauppinen & Malmi, both from Finland, in a paper titled “No Experimental Evidence For Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change” (June 29, 2019) that “… the (IPCC) models fail to derive the influence of low cloud cover fraction on global temperature. A too-small natural component results in a too-large portion for the contribution of greenhouse gases like CO2. The IPCC represents the climate sensitivity more than one order of magnitude larger than our sensitivity 0.24 degrees C. Because the anthropogenic portion in the increased CO2 is less than 10%, we have practically no anthropogenic climate change. The low clouds control mainly the global temperature.” The South China Morning Post on Aug. 11, 2019, next reported that “A new study has found winters in Northern China have been warming since 4000 BC — regardless of human activity — “. This research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and concluded that human activity “… appears to have little to due with increased greenhouse gases.” The “driving forces include the Sun, the atmosphere, and its interaction with the ocean” but “We have detected no evidence of human influence.” This study’s findings confirm an earlier study that was published in Scientific Reports in 2014. Most importantly, the lead investigator for the Kobe University research paper insisted that “… she is now more worried about cooling than warming.” Compellingly, on Sept. 23, 2019, over 500 climate experts delivered a letter to UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, which states (in bold) that “THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY” and that “The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose.” Amazingly, no mainstream news organization has reported any of these facts.
DisplacedCTYankee
October 22, 2019 at 9:36 am
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service announces this morning that Tampa just set a record of 156 days without the temperature falling below 70F, breaking the record.set.last.year.
The Weather Channel = The Panty-Girdle Channel.
gary
October 25, 2019 at 2:33 am
Dig deeper dumb Yankee, you will find they manipulated the data if this is a real thing at all… doubt it is! Yankees are so ignorant!
gary
October 22, 2019 at 5:20 pm
The creator of the weather channel is very public on the fact that climate change is BULLSHIT!
Why? Because it is!
Bullshit that is!
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