For the longest time, chatting about the weather was the apotheosis of small talk.
Awkward pause in the conversation? Stumped about what to say to a colleague? Remarking on the forecast was usually a safe bet.
But the weather is no longer the neutral territory it once was.
Climate change is now squarely part of the American culture wars, and heat waves and flash foods have become fodder for partisan squabbling.
Nowhere is this tension more acute than in the weather departments of local TV stations. As extreme weather becomes more commonplace and climate change raises temperatures around the globe, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the nation’s roughly 2,000 television meteorologists to stay above the fray.
Consider the case of Chris Gloninger.
An award-winning TV weatherman, Gloninger moved to Iowa in 2021 to take the job of chief meteorologist at KCCI, the CBS affiliate in Des Moines. His new bosses were explicit: They wanted him to talk about climate change.
But many of Gloninger’s conservative viewers felt differently. As he began making the connection between extreme weather and human-caused global warming on the air, he began getting hate mail and even a death threat.
As my colleague Cara Buckley recounts in an article she just published, Gloninger began to feel unsafe and eventually moved back to Massachusetts.
What happened to Gloninger is an extreme case. But the episode reveals just how difficult it can be for meteorologists to talk about climate change.
While today’s hyperpartisan politics can take things to an extreme, the meteorology community has been grappling with the issue of how to talk about global warming for more than a decade.
In 2010, the National Science Foundation and George Mason University started a program called Climate Matters. The goal of the effort was to bring data-driven climate news to local audiences, and the appetite for such material has been tremendous.
Climate Matters is now in more than 245 cities and media markets and is working with thousands of reporters and editors around the country.
Bernadette Woods Placky, who runs the program, said that, across the board, more TV meteorologists are talking about global warming in their reporting.
“Our weather has so fundamentally changed because of climate change that it is now part of the story,” she said.
And for the most part, audiences are receptive, she said, adding that TV meteorologists can help explain climate change in real time.
Still, in America these days, politics is as much a part of people’s lives these days as the weather.
Just last month, Steve MacLaughlin, a meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, broke from his usual script.
Days earlier, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had signed a law that meant the state government would no longer be required to consider climate change when writing energy policy.
MacLaughlin used his segment to condemn the law and implore people to go and vote.
“The entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was,” he said. “Please keep in mind, the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands: the right to vote.”
In response to interview requests, MacLaughlin said his employer would not let him discuss the matter further.
Then, there is Jeff Berardelli of WFLA in Tampa. For years now, Berardelli has been one of the most outspoken meteorologists on climate issues, routinely willing to attribute the rise in extreme weather to the rise in global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels and to other heat-trapping gasses.
Just yesterday, he did a segment about the record warmth plaguing the globe over the past year, driving the point that most of the excess heat was the result of human activity.
“My job is to be honest and upfront about the science, and to tell people the facts,” Berardelli said. “I’m not going to couch the truth because it may offend some people.”
Berardelli is not alone. Elissa Raffa at CNN also consistently brings climate coverage into her forecasts. John Morales, also at NBC6 in Miami, has been integrating talk of global warming into his forecasts for years now, as well. Ginger Zee, a meteorologist at ABC, has pushed back against viewers who claim she has a political agenda.
And as extreme weather and record heat become more commonplace, even more meteorologists are going to have to find their own ways of addressing what can at times be a touchy subject with local viewers.
We’ll be keeping tabs on the weather, and how climate change is playing a role. It’s also one of the topics we’ll be discussing onstage with Al Roker at our upcoming Climate Forward event on Sept. 25.
5 more things to know
Rural areas lag in heat protections. Dionne Searcy reports that areas of the United States that are traditionally less hot, like Maine, for example, are considered among the nation’s most socially vulnerable to extreme heat exposure. But many of these areas lack programs that big cities use to keep people cool.
Wall Street’s climate silence. The dire news about the costs of climate change mostly hasn’t registered on Wall Street, Lydia DePillis reports. “In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment,” she writes. “Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers.”
How climate change is affecting our weather: Austyn Gaffney reports that the deadly heat waves that began across Central America last month and moved up into Mexico and the Southwestern United States were made 35 times more likely by human-caused climate change, according to a new report by World Weather Attribution.
That’s one of several reports this year by the group, an international organization of climate scientists. Among the reports that it has issued this year:
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Human-caused global warming made floods like Brazil’s deadly April and May rains twice as likely.
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Over the past year, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they otherwise would have, according to a report by W.W.A. and other groups.
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Climate change made February’s record-breaking heat wave in West Africa 10 times as likely.
Researchers, however, were less clear on climate change’s role in April’s flooding in Dubai and in this year’s drought around the Panama Canal.
Yes, summers are getting hotter. Extremely hot summers, the kind that were virtually unheard-of decades ago, have become increasingly common, Nadja Popovich and Adam Pearce report. The graphic in this article, based on an analysis from researchers at Columbia University, shows how, in recent decades, local summer temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere have shifted conspicuously toward higher heat.
A troubling record. Global energy consumption rose 2 percent last year “pushing fossil fuels and emissions to record levels,” according to a new report by the Energy Institute, an industry group. But dependence on fossil fuels in advanced economies may have peaked, the report found. In Europe, fossil fuels fell below 70 percent of primary energy use for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
