Forecasting Denial: Why Are TV Weathercasters Ignoring Climate Change? Rolling Stone, By Jeff Goodell December 5, 2012 4:30 PM ET
I would object to the term moron. I know several of the Wx folk here in LA through my work, and they certainly are NOT morons.! Most are AMS Certified! In much smaller markets, you have rookie Wxmen, it's how you get experience and grow! Their PRIMARY responsibility is to give you 1 -tomorrows weather, 2 - a 7 to 10 day forecast for the days ahead. They are also there for insight on dramatic weather events, like Hurricane Sandy. Out of a 30 minute news cast, they have about 6 minutes, tops, to get their message to the public in a clear and concise manor. Not much time for Global Warming. They are not there to predict Wx 50, 100 years from now! They do not have the time, it's not their job, there is not time in a timed out newscast! However if the TV station, or Network decides they can produce a 30 or 60 minute special, has the time to broadcast it, much less pay for it with ad revenue, that's their forum to talk about climate change!
Apologies if my rhetorical question offended. Of course, there is a spectrum of qualifications manifested by the members of the profession. The larger point is that there are unqualified persons opining on the matter to an unsuspecting audience. In all things, and especially, in our world of Prius, your mileage may vary.
Yes, I will certainly give you that one!!Whenever I hear something wrong, it throws a knot in my head. Some On Air talent can certainly ramble on. Usually in major markets they have been weeded out before they are hired! Always a good policy to be sure brain is fully functional before putting mouth into gear!
Don't watch weather on TV, ever VPR has the most useful weather for the area, "eye on the sky" NHPR is a joke, it's like a nightmare, but it's actually funny, expect the opposite and laugh about it. I prefer to watch a live radar of approaching weather at weather.com
Meteorologists work with computer models every day and realize they are wrong half the time. This involves predicting the next few days. You are asking them if computer models can predict 100 years in advance. Climate computer models have failed to predict the past decade correctly . But you BELIEVE they will be accurate for the next century?
That reflects my experience very well. It's hard to have any confidence in climate models that the IPCC proudly proclaims can be used as NWP models if initialized appropriately when you personally see these models utterly fail on a routine basis within days on the synoptic scale.
The computer models used for predicting short term weather are completely different from the models used for long term climate. Short term weather is chaotic and highly localized. Long term climate is a global function of energy absorbed from the Sun vs. reflected or radiated away. CO2 dominates in controlling how much of that energy gets trapped by the Earth's atmosphere. Pretending weather models are the same as climate models is like pretending that a civil engineer calculating the physics of a building structure is going to use quantum mechanics probability theories instead of classical physics which averages away all of the chaotic details. I suppose you might pretend that all those random quantum particle behaviors make it impossible to predict if a building is going to be structurally sound in 10 years but that would be silly.
Believe the American Meteorological Society itself has long taken a relatively activist view, which I find somewhat biased. It is interesting at least that they allow some free-thinkers in the ranks. In our area, we have a mix of global warming views by the weatherman, some vocal skeptics but I consider the skeptics to be gifted "talent" (talented on-air performers) but not necessarily "college" trained in meteorology/science. So I am not swayed by the views of the skeptic weatherman. But by-and-large we probably get the activist top-down leadership from AMS. The Rolling Stone article seems to be complaining that any skeptics are allowed to be meteorologists.
Have you read the IPCC AR4 report? Direct quote from that report... (Page 595) (Page 626) I acknowledge that I have not worked directly with climate models. However, based on my understanding of those models, the model structure is essentially identical to the NWP models that I've used essentially on a daily basis in the NWS, same basic equations, same parameterizations, etc. It appears to me that the GFS and ECMWF NWP models (both global models) could be used as climate models if run out far enough.
