By Paul Yeager, author of Weather Whys: Facts, Myths, and Oddities
Meteorologists and weather presenters have more doubt about global warming than do climate scientists, according to a study by researchers at George Mason Universty and the University of Texas Austin.
Being a meteorologist, I’m not surprised.
Weather is Naturally Extreme
Meteorologists have a better understanding of how the weather works than the average person; therefore, the meteorologist is more likely to be skeptical when a particular extreme weather pattern or storm is attributed to global warming if he has seen this type of weather in the past.
It’s difficult for a meteorologist to simply chalk up a blizzard, heat wave, or a series of storms to global warming when he/she has seen the same type of thing happen in days before we were concerned with global warming. Just last winter, intense storms were sometimes blamed on global warm when many forecasters expected more storms than normal because of the overall pattern.
When a meteorologists sees a pattern he’s seen before and the results are the same, he tends to believe that it was caused by natural weather factors, not global warming.
That’s not to say that meteorologists don’t necessarily believe that global atmospheric temperatures have risen in recent decades, global warming might not have some effect on the weather, that we should continue to rely on oil as our main energy source, or any other of a number of things.
It is, however, an indication of how meteorologists look at things.
And, being one, I understand completely.
Record California Heat Wave
Here’s a brief (I hope) example of what I mean. In the summer of 2006, an intense heat wave occurred in California, including an all-time record high of 119 degrees in Woodland Hills, California. Immediately–and understandably–there was talk of global warming.
I’ll spare you all of the weather details, but from my perspective at the time, it was the position of the upper-level high pressure system and the local topography that was responsible for the hot weather extending so far to the west into Southern California, not the strength of the high pressure system.
In other words, it’s not as if the atmosphere itself were warmer than I’d ever seen before (which is what I might expect if global warming were to blame), but it was the position of the high pressure system that was different.
Perhaps the position of the high pressure system was different because of global warming, but I’d need to see research that indicates that before I’d chalk it up to anything more than the type of extreme weather I’d seen before.
