“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” sang Bob Dylan in 1965. Now, the weathermen are warning us about winds that would have been unimaginable 60 years ago.
One meteorologist, John Morales in Miami, broke down on the air last week describing the terrifying ferocity of Hurricane Milton as it closed in on Florida. It wasn’t just the peril facing those in the storm’s path that brought tears to Morales’s eyes. It was also a sense of helplessness. After 40 years practicing weather science, he finds himself working in a state whose Republican governor signed a law this spring deleting the words “climate change” from state statutes.
Other forecasters have been getting death threats for talking about science. Chris Gloninger, the award-winning chief meteorologist at KCCI in Des Moines, Iowa, was told by station managers to play down his discussions of global warming because viewers didn’t want to hear about it. He resisted, saying it was an essential part of his job. But the menacing emails, including one especially scary one, were finally more than Gloninger could take. He resigned in June 2023 and took a job as a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Group here on the Cape.
With this year’s hurricane season, the madness has grown worse. The attacks and threats on meteorologists have reached new heights, Kate Selig reported in the New York Times this week. There has been “a palpable difference in tone and aggression toward people in my field,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program and former president of the American Meteorological Society.
The climate change deniers are pushing an insane conspiracy theory: that “the government is creating or controlling the storms,” Selig wrote. “Forecasters have been harassed for either failing to promote these claims or for disseminating accurate information that counters them.”
Lies about the weather have been spreading on social media, and the efforts of scientists and civil servants to debunk them have failed. “Since late September, when Helene made landfall, the number of articles and social media posts that mentioned both hurricanes alongside terms such as ‘geoengineered,’ ‘manipulated’ and ‘weather weapons’ has ballooned,” the Times reported. One analyst of the universe of disinformation called this latest version a “complete breakdown” of essential channels of communication for disaster relief.
The pursuit of truth is work that scientists and journalists hold in common. If that pursuit is denigrated to the point that many people don’t even want to know what science says about hurricanes, what are we as journalists to do?
We can look to the example of the scientists and librarians across the country who trawled government websites to copy and preserve climate change data right before President Trump took office in 2017. One of his first acts was to scrub all mention of climate change from the White House website.
And we can look to the next generation. When John Morales’s tearful weather report went viral, he received strong support from young people. “They’re feeling anxious about the changing climate,” he said. “Well, so am I.”
