Weather Reports Are Missing the Story

The floodwaters are rising, swamping cities, breaching levees. Tens of thousands are displaced. Many are dead. No, I am not talking about Hurricane Katrina, but about the Midwest United States. As the floodwaters head south along the Mississippi, devastating communities one after another, the media are overflowing with televised images of the destruction.

While the TV meteorologists document “extreme weather” with their increasingly sophisticated toolbox, from Doppler radar to 3-D animated maps, the two words rarely uttered are its cause: global warming. I asked former Energy Department official Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, about the disconnect:

“Part of the reason is that the people who write about global warming for most newspapers and TV are not the same people as those who tend to cover weather. In general, the media is covering this as all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet … you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions.”

Perry Beeman is an award-winning investigative reporter for The Des Moines Register, and former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. From his flood-racked city of Des Moines, he told me: “Not even a few weeks before this all happened, we were in the middle of doing a climate-change series that’s going to run over the year. We had two-page graphic talking about the different things that would happen and pointing out … that you would expect more torrential rains. What has happened here is consistent with many scientists’ view of what global warming will mean in the Midwest.”

So if the disasters that follow one another, from hurricanes to tornadoes to flooding, are consistent with global warming, why aren’t the networks, the weather reporters, making the link? Dr. Heidi Cullen, a climate expert on The Weather Channel, created a stir in late 2006 when she wrote in her Weather Channel blog: “If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming.”

As reporters stood in waist-high water in the flooded downtowns of major American cities, President George Bush basked in the sunlight in Washington, D.C., urging Congress to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling and on oil shale drilling, and to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. While regular people are getting hit in the wallet at the gas pump, paying now more than $4 per gallon for gasoline, the oil, coal and gas industries are reaping huge rewards, and applying pressure to open up protected spaces for resource extraction.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/19/9755/

It is not part of our common experience to hear that climate change and global issues related to such ARE a REALITY. Somewhere, the meme that this is all just leftist scientists and hippies is still common thought and it wil be our demise.

My father, who I THOUGHT was a democrat...is 75 and spends way too much time deteriorating in front of the TV (faux, MSNBC, etc)was telling me about the midwest and what he saw today. I said "well, what do you expect, this is Global Warming and its drastic impacts." He just about ate my arse for breakfast!
he actually said this:
"Fuckin Al Gore and his Global Warming..."
"If the weather people have all these electronics and can't predict more than 2 days out, how do these guys think they can tell us about 100 years from now?!"

I was so upset, all I could say was "okay dad, love you bye"

I had a similar talk with my mom today ironically enough, and though she admits the problem is real, she has a defeatist mindset because "look at the other counties that won't stop, China is doing it worse and if they won't stop, what's the use?"

This is what we are still up against. The frog is boiling and people refuse to see the need for drastic change. Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step, and we as a nation and as a planet are SO not there...

:scared:
Well, I guess we'll see if the species survives the next flip-flop ....either ice or fire...it's-a-comin'

radio, then it's hard to imagine how important it is to the righties that global warming be MADE OUT TO BE a socialist fraud- a way of making the fat and happy, fat and unhappy, and shame on us for afflicting the comfortable! No matter how much evidence is presented, the very fact that someone is willing to listen and consider the evidence says that person has fallen for the evil schemeing of the power mad collectivists, in the interest of more government regulation, bigger government, more taxes and the continued oppression of the most productive section of the human race, the white male who says he's straight (and produces kids as proof, just like he attends church and loves sports, which prove his godliness/manliness)...the point is it matters not a whit whether global warming is fact or conman fiction, what matters is: how dare anyone question the status of those who have ALWAYS been the ones assigning the status of everybody else (a thankless task but necessary for lawn order, must be the logic)(!) You can hear these whiners everyday on any talkradio show in the land. Global warming is not important, indeed it's so incidental to the actual debate that, in case no one noticed, there's vast sums of money to be made being 'green' and, meanwhile, the corporations sure aren't belittling the idea, so in a way it's another win win situation (and it also, btw, displaces any talk about criminal behavior in boardrooms/oval offices etc).... rush limbah has his cake, and has eaten the damn things a million times too, in public, and yet he's the persecuted minority!
A truth is just the lie dressed up nicelike....
(Al Capone was once asked if he ever regretted being so successful, in the world of crime, and if everyone became a criminal, wouldn't the world be a big mess in 500 years. Al thought about it for a minute, then said 'hey, i'll be dead in 500 years!' and that was all he had to say about it)