There’s a saying about someone who is overly delicate or in their use of language, “She couldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful.”
I’ve been following local TV coverage of the extreme flooding in the upper midwest, including WCCO out of Minneapolis.
The report above popped out, and is an example of the halting way that local newsrooms are dealing with all-too obvious impacts of climate change. On one positive extreme, you have Jeff Berardelli’s ground breaking focus on climate impacts in his regular spots for WFLA in Tampa, which I regularly highlight.
On the other hand, in nearby Iowa, Meteorologist Chris Gloninger was driven away from his job at KCCI in Des Moines by continuing harassment and death threats to himself and his family.
Above, the Desk anchors pose the question, “If you’re wondering why there’s been so much high water lately”, and then soften the answer with “experts say there’s been several factors at play.”
Minnesota’ Lieutenant Governor is shown, flatly attributing the disasters to a changed climate.
Then, there’s a switch to the station meteorologist, who equivocates in a way that waters down the message. There is a short acknowledgment that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture – but one could still come away with the take that “it’s all part of the big cycle. Sometimes it’s wet and sometimes it’s dry.”
CNN Meteorologist Bill Weir titled a recent piece “Say It!”
When my preschooler reaches my age, science predicts that the average American city will feel like it has moved more than 500 miles south, and our Brooklyn neighborhood will have the heat and humidity of Jonesboro, Arkansas. Anchorage will be warmer by 24°F and almost 360 percent wetter. A hotter, drier Tucson would match Mexican towns in the Sonoran Desert, and Jacksonville, Florida, will feel like the northern border of Belize.
This will rearrange everything: insurance rates, property values, building codes, growing seasons, supply chains, immigrant streams and cultural identities — which means there is a bottomless well of story ideas for every local newsroom in North America to help their viewers survive and thrive.
But even as the summer of ‘23 went down as the hottest since the birth of Christ and the nation suffered nearly 42 billion-dollar disasters in just the past 18 months, it is still a radical novelty to hear your local newscasters connect these facts with the unnatural disaster in their backyard.
“Say it!” I yell at too many live shots amid wreckage. “If you can’t say the words ‘climate change’ when you are standing in it, I know people who can!”
But at the same time, I empathize. I’ve sat mute on plenty of news sets where it was easier to chuckle, “Hot enough for ya?” in the toss to weather than, “You know, Stormy, some of today’s heat wave is brought to you by our friends at Chevron.”
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As lives and fortunes are lost in what is set to be a summer of record-shattering unnatural disaster, it’s long past time for the only scientists in every living room — our local weather folks — to give their audience the facts about climate science, without fear or favor.
It is time for station managers to encourage anchors to back them up and empower their producers and reporters to pitch and cover all angles of the climate crisis, both the nightmares of flood and fire and the profitable dreams of clean tech, Earth repair and a more resilient future.
But my “everyone is a climate reporter” fantasy can only come true with viewers and advertisers who let their stations know how much this kind of reporting is valued.
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Below, Steve Mclaughlin at South Florida’s NBC6 took it upon himself to shake his viewers awake.