Baltimore Weathermen Say Global Warming is a Conspiracy, “Scam”

By Evan Serpick (Baltimore City Paper, 12/10/2012)

Last week, Rolling Stone ran a story about how TV meteorologists—the “weather experts” who have the most con­tact with the gen­eral population—tend to be doubters of the sci­ence of cli­mate change. This despite the fact that rag­tag con­spir­acy the­o­rists like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA) and the Amer­i­can Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Soci­ety (AMS), to which vir­tu­ally every weath­er­man and weath­er­woman in Amer­ica belongs, state unequiv­o­cally that anthro­pogenic (human-caused) cli­mate change (ACC) is absolute fact.

WBAL’s Tony Pann. (Facebook.com)

It turns out that sev­eral of Baltimore’s best and bright­est TV weath­er­man fit the trend to a tee. WBAL’s Tony Pann, who won City Paper’s “Best Weath­er­man” this year, posted the RS story on his Face­book page, call­ing it “ridicu­lous” and refer­ring to ACC as a “theory.”

It was sug­gested to Pann on Face­book that he renounce his mem­ber­ship in the AMS (which he brags about on the WBAL web­site) over its posi­tions that “Warm­ing of the cli­mate sys­tem now is unequiv­o­cal” and that the “dom­i­nant cause of the rapid change in cli­mate of the past half cen­tury is human-induced.” He said, “I think a lot of AMS mem­bers are going to do just that! I won’t be alone. The AMS took some seri­ous lob­by­ing heat from those in the reaserch [sic] field. If you are mak­ing a liv­ing on gov­ern­ment grants to research global warm­ing, and have been for 20 years, you don’t want that money to dry up! I hate to say it, but you just have to fol­low the money.”

Pann, who holds a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in mete­o­rol­ogy from North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­sity, says this despite the fact that, accord­ing to a study by the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences (NPAS), “(i) 97–98% of the cli­mate researchers most actively pub­lish­ing in the field sup­port the tenets of ACC out­lined by the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change, and (ii)the rel­a­tive cli­mate exper­tise and sci­en­tific promi­nence of the researchers uncon­vinced of ACC are sub­stan­tially below that of the con­vinced researchers.

And he’s not the only local 7-day fore­caster throw­ing out con­spir­acy the­o­ries about cli­mate change. WMAR’s Mike Masco, who has a bachelor’s degree in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and a cer­tifi­cate in “Broad­cast Mete­o­rol­ogy,” joined in the Face­book debate, call­ing global warm­ing “the biggest scam in mod­ern time,” and insist­ing “I don’t drink the lib­eral coolaid [sic].”

Asked for com­ment, Justin Berk, for­merly of WMAR, said the Rolling Stone story “was writ­ten with an agenda,” and also referred to ACC as “a theory.”

Continue reading “Baltimore Weathermen Say Global Warming is a Conspiracy, ‘Scam'” at Baltimore City Paper.

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