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TV Weathercasters
Fri Dec 02, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton with The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global Climate
Change. What does your television weatherperson know about our warming climate?
Correspondent Bob Henson looked at the question.
BH: When it comes to global warming, most TV weathercasters don't go near the
subject. But Kris Wilson did. He's a former weathercaster who now teaches journalism
at the University of Texas. Wilson recently surveyed over 200 weathercasters around
the nation to find out what they knew about climate change.
KW: Well, there's good news and bad news from the results. Good news such as, 93%
of weathercasters acknowledge that weather and climate are not synonymous, that
they are very different concepts. Most weathercasters thought that climate change is a
serious environmental issue. Most of them recognized carbon dioxide as a
greenhouse gas, but then when you get to the subtle nuances of understanding that,
as the world warms up, the world will be cloudier and the world will be wetter, the
numbers dropped off very dramatically.
BH: Wilson found that those who knew more about climate change tended to be more
concerned about it. That doesn't necessarily mean they can put their concerns on the
air.
KW: One of the sources for this research said that they had a memo, internal, and it
said the term 'global warming' was not to be used on any of their local news or weather
broadcasts.
BH: Wilson sees weathercasters as a main link between science and the
public.
KW: Certainly they're prominent science communicators in our culture, and we don't
know very much about them, so this attempt was to try to get a first look at their ability to
communicate this very important topic.
Meteorologist Bob Henson comes to us from Boulder, Colorado. The Weather
Notebook is supported by Subaru of America, with funding for our Climate Change
series from Environmental Defense.
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