Amy Goodman: Weather Reports Are Missing the Story

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Weather Reports Are Missing the Story

Posted on Jun 18, 2008
By Amy Goodman

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. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080618_weather_reports_are_missing_the_story

[navarth]

1. That's a great article, thanks marmar

once again, I wish I wish I could vote for Nader and not feel like I was throwing the election to the fascists. And thank the Godz for Amy Goodman.

It would be inspirational indeed to see these clown TV weather people really doing an important job instead of fluff.

[malaise]

2. Great read -thanks

K & R

[G_j]

3. recommended!

[cascadiance]

4. Here's a specific local example of this in Iowa City on a newer Iowa flood blog...

http://www.iowaunderwater.com/blog/post.asp?iBlogID=96&iPostID=453

...

In 1997, after several years of beurocratic meetings, the Corps of Engineers determined, suprisingly, that "There is no Federal interest in a study of the optimal regulation of the reservoir." The Corps was unwilling to hear any public input regarding this decision and ceased any efforts on developing a written contingency plan for lake operation in the event of a flash flood.

In spite of the firm decision handed down to the public by the Corps of Engineers, Larry Molnar and Charles Newsome wrote a review of some of the major procedural and technical flaws of the Corp's decision. In their report, Larry and Charles suggest that the Corps was ignoring an opportunity to take some factors into account when optimizing the regulation of the reservoir. Among other things, Larry and Charles mention a potential long-term climate shift that was not a consideration in the original design of the reservoir and dam. This reference to Global Warming, would most likely be well received today, but in 1997, it was dismissed without further discussion. This report was forwarded on to the Corps of Engineers in 1997 and I can find no record of any response to it from the Corps.

...

[PATRICK]

5. Our local guy

who reaches hundreds of thousands of innocent souls, is a paid global warming scoffer. Added to the myopia of seeing "weather" in all its forms as the only picture and climate just as the superset that stretches to include the weatherman's geographical placement and huge "norm" parameters is deliberate corporate bias.

Corporate bias comes out in the total infotainment presentation where "weather" once innocently seen in its relevance to farm crops, is there for leisure and entertainment value. Nice sunny days, even in the midst of a drought, are praised with smileys and cheering and "records" are there for the perpetual edification of the spotless mind. it would take a long spate of "extreme weather" for any climate change to be recognized at all and with that kind of incredulous myopia, any causes off the meteorological maps simply cannot exist. We just got used to believing the trendy "El Nino" god into the pantheon. Human global warming is seen as too personally threatening to join in.

You might as well bring back the weather readers as allow the over performing meteorologists themselves to bully the screen on behalf of polluters.

[ensho]

6. kick

nt

[Peace Patriot]

7. 1. Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

2. Once we start electing REAL representatives of the people, dismantle the corporate 'news' monopolies, for starters (and the Exxon Mobil's for seconders): pull their corporate charters, seize their assets for the common good, and start over.

Corporations and their monopolies have no right to exist. Period. End of story. But to exercise our rightful sovereignty over them, we have to reclaim our voting system from RIGHTWING BUSHITE CORPORATIONS, who are now 'counting' all the votes with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls. That was the fascist coup, believe me (Oct. 02--same month as the Iraq War Resolution).

And this is why your TV screen is filled with some grinning baboon, called a weather person, whose fancy, colorful radar graphics can't disguise the sheer stupidity--and the black holes where real information should be--in their Idiotville presentations of weather 'news'.

The weather is BAD, my friends. Bad, bad, bad. 80% of the world's forests have been destroyed or seriously depleted and damaged, over the last one hundred years, by corporate greed. The last of the planet's lungs are being mowed down for corporate corn and soy biofuel production, while millions and millions of campesinos--peasant farmers, the best food producers--have been driven from the land by U.S. "war on drugs" pesticide spraying and other means, into urban squalor where they can't find jobs and can't feed their families and communities. Half the bee populations--critical for food crops--are dead, due to corporate pesticides. (Organic bees don't die--unless they're near toxic corporate ag lands.) There have been alarming die-offs of bird, frog and fish populations--due to human made pollutants, global warming disruptions of migration routes, loss of habitat, and mysterious diseases in the wild. The World Wildlife Fund gives the planet 50 years, at present levels of consumption and pollution--50 years to the DEATH of the planet!

Death. Of. The. Planet.

And that asshole corporate "weather person" on your TV has been hired and groomed to KEEP THIS INFORMATION FROM YOU. They given them stupid pills with their paychecks.

Out of control corporate greed, corporate monopolies and corporate power--all related to corporate vote 'counting.'

So I say that's where we must start--by restoring vote counting that everyone can see and understand. And I think we would be amazed at what the collective wisdom of the American people can do, if we can restore our democracy and our sovereign power. They're doing it all over South America--and the basis of that amazing revolution is TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING. Why not here?

[G_j]

8. kick