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he weatherman’sHe is still wearing a striped tie around his neck as he begins an evening swim for his three children. One of them runs naked from the toilet and does a lap around in the kitchen before running back with his feet slapping on hardwood floors. “Okay,” Shel Winkley says, walking into the kitchen where his wife is loading the dishwasher. “I love you,” he tells her, and then he walks outside to his gray Prius, gets in, and drives to the TV station. Dinner’s over. It’s time to get back to work.
It’s warm outside in Bryan, Texas, warmer than usual on this Wednesday night in October, and on KBTX at 10 p.m. Winkley is going to talk about rising temperatures as Global climate change is a sign. The climate crisis, naturally, is This is a divisive topicAmerica. A little less than a third of adults don’t see a crisis at all; they see a melodrama. Winkley, 36, didn’t worry much about climate change.
Winkley was just a few years away from college ten years ago. He was focused on his job and making sure he didn’t mess up on air. TV was intense—the hours, the pace, the volume of work—and he was, as he puts it, a “baby deer.” In school he’d certainly learned about the climate, because he had to understand trends in long-term weather in order to issue Forecasts for the short-term. However, when class discussions turned towards climate change, his meteorology professors spoke mostly about natural cycles and not human causes.
Winkley is now glued to his desk, looking at his three monitors. He’s clicking and clacking as he compiles the weather. On the center monitor he’s loaded rows of daily temperature data, which he’s copying one day at a time into a calendar open on the left monitor. The calendar has a large blank space in the right corner. It’s 8:27 p.m., and in an hour and a half, when the calendar is projected on the studio’s green screen, he’ll stand in front of the blank space. He has the script in front of him. (The right monitor is Twitter. On Twitter, his fans respond with piles upon piles of hearts to his tweets. He looks at a coming day’s temperature and the number of degrees it’s forecasted to climb above average. “Pff!” he exclaims. “17.” One or two days like that in October, sure, he says, but several days last week have all exceeded the average by 10 degrees or more, which is not normal. “It’s worrisome.”
The room around him is as large and bright as a high-school classroom. Every surface seems to shine: the polished floor, dark obsidian; the four tripod-mounted cameras in the middle of the floor; and the five on air desks, ringed in chrome, faux mahogany and block letters that read, News, sports, weather, pinpoint. TV is a fancy medium, and we like that, don’t we? It’s so popular that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bolster of Labor Statistics), Americans watched TV more than three hours per day in 2020. While newspapers are falling all around (more than 2,100 gone since 2004), local TV continues to command our attention like tennis balls command a dog. In 2020, local news stations earned $18.4 billion in ad revenue. That’s enough money to build, say, our nation’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and then buy a couple of baseball teams to play on its deck, which would make, in fact, for good TV.
When Winkley finishes his prep for the 10 p.m. broadcast, it’s only 9:23. “Now the question is,” he says to himself, “do I try to bang out a story, or do I play with Instagram?” Both. He starts uploading a behind-the-scenes video montage of him and his team on set doing the news and the weather, and then, begrudgingly, begins writing a story for the station’s website. He writes a headline and deletes it. Then he ponders another headline and then switches back over to the video that he has uploaded. He watches it again. “Yeah,” he says. “That’ll work.” Then, out of distractions, he resumes writing. “October 2021,” he clacks into the keyboard, “is making a run at one of the warmest ever on record in Bryan–College Station. As of Wednesday”—click-click, clack-clack. We now have a commercial break thanks to our sponsors.
S
o let’s doThe math is simple. This is almost a third American adults. That’s how many people don’t worry much or at all about global warming in this country, according to a September 2021 survey. Seventy-seven million adults could populate New York City nearly nine times over, but that’d be a bad idea, considering big chunks of the Big Apple are projected to be permanently flooded by 2100. If we continue to emit carbon dioxide, the fires in California’s mountains may have doubled or tripled their size by then, and heat waves in the Midwest could be killing thousands each year.
Seventy seven million people aren’t worried at all or hardly worry, even though disaster seems like an endless season. Why won’t these Americans change their minds? One category of American adults (the 8 percent who are “dismissive” of global warming, according to polling by the Climate Change in the American Mind project) may not because the crisis contradicts their constructed reality. These Americans are predominantly older, white, Republican men who consider themselves to be strong individuals and not members of a community. Instead of accepting that the planet’s temperature is rising, they reject facts in favor conspiracy theories. Many of these Americans are attracted to conservative media. Their consumption of it stimulates their denial, which in turn stimulates their consumption conservative media, which in turn invigorates them.
These Americans, among others, are stuck in what researchers have called “reinforcing spirals.” Social scientists have long assumed that most of the Americans misinformed about climate change were protecting a constructed reality, but that view is shifting. A More recent studies suggests that many in this cohort, which could include the “dismissive,” are sincerely interested in the truth. These people aren’t suspicious of the evidence because it contradicts their view of the crisis but because they don’t trust the available messengers, namely the scientific community and the mainstream media. Fox News is one alternative to partisan media. However, Fox News has only captured a small portion of the American public. Many more people watch less-partisan TV like NBC, ABC and CBS. “Media outlets with a significant partisan or ideological slant,” the study states, “simply do not reach most of the U.S. population.” So these Americans seeking the truth have fallen through the climate cracks.
Winkley was one of the few local TV meteorologists who existed up to a decade ago. At that time, about half of the country’s TV weathercasters either weren’t certain that the world was warming or were certain that it wasn’t. Those who said they’d experienced obstacles to reporting on climate change in part cited problems similar to the public’s today: They doubted the information they were reading, watching, and hearing. They didn’t trust their messenger and were often too busy to find one.
A group of journalists and scientists, some of whom had previously worked in TV, started to try to win the trust of TV meteorologists in 2010. The group’s nonprofit, Climate Central, along with partner organizations secured a National Science Foundation grant for their program, which started with a single TV meteorologist, Jim Gandy, in South Carolina. Gandy was interested in climate change, but he had never had the time to do the necessary research for on-air segments. Every month, Climate Central provided him with localized climate-change content that he could use during broadcasts—graphics, analyses, maps—which was a huge help, he told me. “I couldn’t have done it,” he said, “without Climate Central.” As the nonprofit expanded its efforts to more stations and more meteorologists, its members were careful not to preach policy solutions; instead, they asked broadcasters how they could help them report on climate change. “We never looked at it like, ‘We’re the ones in charge,’” Bernadette Woods Placky, the program’s director, told me. “It was a relationship. It was a partnership.”
Climate Central had a staff of 10 weathercasters by 2012. It had a total of 100 weathercasters working with it by 2013. By 2013, its localized reports had quadrupled. With more exposure to reliable climate-change information, the number of participating weathercasters grew. They began to see climate change as it was. By 2017, 95 per cent of TV weathercasters believed that the climate was actually changing. 80 percent of TV weathercasters agreed that human activity was the main reason for climate change by 2020. The facts did what facts do when people are actually seeking the truth: They changed their minds. Weathercasters are better equipped than anyone to help the remaining Americans navigate the same transition, as they have their eyes open for the crisis. One 2013 Study, frequently cited, found that the more people liked a TV weathercaster, the more likely they were to be positively influenced by that weathercaster’s discussion of climate change.
Most Americans typically don’t follow the news until something big happens; once the news cycle is done, surveys show, so are they. Only half of Americans hear about climate change in the news at least once per month. And only one fifth of Americans say they hear it from others they know within the same time frame. “As a result, it just isn’t a salient or terribly intense concern for many,” John Kotcher, a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told me. Their local TV station is often the best source of news for Americans who want it. There, people they recognize and like tell them about the weather, and, lately, these familiar people have begun mentioning “climate-change this” and “climate-change that,” making a crisis that seemed distant and abstract feel a little more real.
“I think there’s a degree of kinship that comes with that” connection, Kotcher said. “As a result, there’s trust there that isn’t necessarily present with, for example, members of the local university.” Those climate scientists, he said, certainly know more about climate change than the local TV meteorologist; they’re just not visible to the public. Winkley is. People see him on television. People see him at their county fair. People see him on their streets, eating at their local restaurants, and buying groceries from their grocery store. “Shel is deeply plugged into this community,” Josh Gorbutt, KBTX’s news director, told me when I visited in October. “He is omnipresent. He turns the lights on in downtown Bryan with Santa Claus every year.” When KBTX canceled its 2020 holiday lighting with Santa because of the pandemic, the station distributed little cardboard cutouts of Winkley beaming under a Santa hat. Viewers sent back photos of Winkley at home, perched on the mantle, suspended from a Christmas tree, and attached to a menorah. “Shel,” they called it, “on the shelf.”
Winkley is a difficult audience member despite his dad charm and witty on-air jokes. He also has an earnest, obvious joy in explaining complex scientific concepts in small, easy to understand chunks. Even if he succeeds in localizing the global crisis, in establishing that this rain or that heat wave or these winds are not normal, his audience’s definition of normal can quickly change. Texas is a land of extremes, after all, and weather that initially looks like evidence of climate change can soon become routine: The climate’s not changing. We’ve always had storms like this. People can only worry so many times. Social scientists have a name for this too: “the finite pool of worry.” In that pool are a lot of smaller crises, such as getting the kids to school, getting them COVID-tested so they can even go to school, getting yourself to work, getting the kids home, getting the kids to eat dinner. It’s getting them to take a shower, as Winkley was doing on that hot October night.
And we’re back!We appreciate you staying tuned. While y’all were gone Winkley managed to bang out his story for the TV station’s website, and now Rusty Surette and Karla Castillo have entered the studio through a hidden door and taken their seats behind the anchor desk labeled News. Each of them is snapped by a camera. Castillo takes care of her hair while Surette stares down at a computer. Winkley puts on a blue blazer to match his blue slacks and walks behind the camera. Weather forecastsHe looks at his watch and then he looks up. They’re live.
“Controversial comments,” Surette says to the camera, “made by a city councilman. What he said and how the councilman’s responding, tonight.”
Castillo: “A Bryan man gets life in prison. Prosecutors say he will never hurt another child.”
Surette: “A drive-through dispute leads to a customer being arrested. Police say she struck a pair of fast-food workers with her car.”
Castillo: “The skyline of College Station will change again. We’ll show you where the newest high-rise is planned.”
Surette: “The Houston Astros are one win away from going back to the World Series after beating the Red Sox in Boston.”
Winkley: “A few of us may drop into a cloud of fog first thing tomorrow morning. Humidity is on the increase across the Brazos Valley, along with temperatures, in the coming days.”
Now a segment on that council member’s controversial comment—“Racist,” an opponent says; “Resign,” says another—as Winkley strolls to the green screen where he’s about to do his forecast.
In a sense, Winkley’s always been a weatherman. He grew up in Lubbock, Texas, so terrified of storms that he’d watch forecasters plot their course county by county on the TV, atlas in his lap. If a storm got close, his family’s power would cut out, and in the dark, he’d have no idea where the tornado was. He walked outside one morning after a storm and looked down the street. A few houses had rolled in the wind. He doesn’t know why, but after that he wasn’t afraid of storms anymore. They fascinated him. He began to tell people that he wanted the job of a weatherman.
Winkley has been with KBTX, a CBS affiliate for 13 years and still feels important. One time, after he’d finished talking to students at a local school, a mom walked up and thanked him for staying up late so many nights to track storms for them. Winkley was touched by this gesture. “I like to know that people care,” he told me, because he cares about them. When he talks about climate change on air, he’s simply trying to help Texans prepare for its impacts. Often he won’t even say the words climate change, because he knows that for many of his viewers, they’re trigger words. If they tune him out, he can’t do his job.
Winkley never rejected the reality of climate change, but when he graduated from college in 2007, he didn’t think much about it. Though he’d read articles and studies online, some seemed to contradict one another; most discussed distant phenomena. His interest in climate change and its impacts grew as he learned more. Winkley began working at KBTX in 2009. After a few years, he realized that local weather patterns were changing in ways predicted by climate change computer models. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, making it landfall on the Gulf Coast. Streets were destroyed by the ocean rising up to 12 feet. Houses were thrown off the streets by winds that exceeded 100 miles per hour. The rain fell 50 inches in some places, scattering the debris across communities that had never experienced such a disaster. Man, Winkley thought as he reported on the hurricane, we just picked up a year’s worth of rain in three days. He saw it as an academic curiosity that had turned into an immediate crisis.
Surette and Castillo have completed the news and Winkley’s camera goes live. “I hope,“ he told me earlier in the night while he was compiling temperature data, “that people know I’m not trying to push an agenda.” Because he isn’t. He is worried. It is not the theatrical worry that conservative talk-show hosts make fun of on prime-time television. The real deal. He remembers the worry he felt as a child when, outside his home, a tornado was turning homes. He says that while storms are fascinating to him now, climate change is terrifying. “This is the point,” he told me. “We’ve talked about it for a long time—like, we’ve got to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius.” But natural disasters are now unnaturally common, “so the question is: Is this what you want to live with, or do you want to live with something worse?”
Winkley begins to talk on air. “The mornings we’ve had recently where temperatures were nice and cool outside were definitely great to have, especially in the month of October. What you’re looking at here, though—these are our morning temperatures compared to average, so far in the month.”
In the studio, the green screen is still just a green screen, but on the thousands of TVs across 16 counties, people see their friendly weathercaster talking to them from the right-hand corner of the calendar he’d built earlier that night. Nearly every day is colored red because of unseasonably high temperatures.
“And you can see most of our mornings have been above average. In fact, for the 12th, 13th, and 14th”—he points at those days then looks into the camera, eyebrows raised—“we’re anywhere from 10 to 15 degrees above average. And I bring that up because we’re falling right back into that trend.”
Beyond the frame, the teleprompter is projecting a script Winkley ad-libbed earlier, but he’s not closely following the text. He normally doesn’t. He is prone to improvise, drawing from other places, speaking quickly, using commas and periods, and stringing sentences together with semicolons. He is very energetic. Management’s never gotten in his way when he wants to talk about climate change. They support him.
On all TVs, a red line appears in the background. The line slopes steadily up.
“And this is a trend, as the climate continues to change, that we continue to see. Climate Central’s colleagues have analyzed the past 50 year data and found that about 18 more days were warmer than average in September and October and November since 1970. This means that we are about three and a 1/2 degrees warmer now than in the 1970s.
“And we’re going to continue with that warming trend this week,” he says, transitioning flawlessly to the weather forecast—which is what his viewers tuned in for in the first place.
OMy last dayIn Texas, I take the rental car down an old asphalt road to a sandy road, then down a dirt road, then through deep ditches that grab my bumper, and finally up a grassy driveway until reaching the top of a steep hill covered in green trees. The hillside is about 50 miles from Bryan. Three acres of blackberry bushes, peach and plum trees line its east-facing side. They’re the pride and livelihood of Steve and Carole Huebner, 72 and 71, who are seated at a table inside, eating blackberry coffee cake and drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups.
Steve says everyone has an opinion about climate change. Okay. It was cyclical. That was his view of it up until a few year ago. “That to me was some of my reasons for the changes. Now”—he sighs. “We don’t know. That’s why we rely on Shel.”
“Something’s definitely happening,” Carole says.
“More and more evidence is coming out that says it’s man-made,” Steve says. But there are some groups that say cows are causing it, “and, well, that’s a bunch of crap. Literally.” He raises his eyebrows, punctuating the joke. Steve’s humor is dry.
Carole says that even though years with only a little cold are not common, they are often very rare. However, those years are always a problem because blackberries, plums, peaches and other fruits need the cold to thrive.
“But our winters,” Steve says, taking a bite of coffee cake, “have gotten milder. Okay. Some people will call this climate change. We may say, ‘Okay, that’s another cyclical pattern.’”
“We’re still kinda not sure,” Carole says.
“Well, the term has been used as a political football,” Steve says, “and that turns us off.”
Many Texans are turned off by politics. The day before I’d gone to the Brazos Valley fair, where Winkley and a camera operator had done two live segments on the weather. I was walking with an employee from the TV station, who introduced me to two of her friends. They were both 4-H moms and were standing under their pop-up tent. They smiled at me. But then I said, “Hi. My name is Dan Schwartz and I’m with The Atlantic, and I want to talk with you about climate change,” and their smiles fell off their faces like a pair of refrigerator magnets. “Oh,” the TV-station employee said. “I didn’t know that’s what the story was about.”
Psychology is a constraint on our ability to perceive the world. However, external forces can also impact our perceptions of the world. Climate change is a political football because corporate agents and public figures continue to wrap it up in cowhide and call the hoax a hoax. Historically, science and journalism have kept the facts straight, but large pockets of the American public don’t trust those institutions anymore, which leaves them open to less-honest messengers. Fox News, for example, is a longtime broadcaster of climate misinformation (as are the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, which, like Fox News, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire). Fox Corporation launched Fox Weather in October., a 24-hour weather platform “expected to change the way Americans consume weather news and analysis,” Fox News announced. Critics pointed out that Fox Weather had largely ignored the role of climate change in its coverage of extreme weather.
Who is truthful? What is the truth? What is real?
“We read. We see things,” Steve says. He adds that we see that the Arctic sea-ice is melting.
Winkley, TV weathercaster
“It just worries me that the powers that be will go too far in the other direction” as far as banning fossil fuels, Carole says.
Or partisan outlets like Fox News?
“This is Texas, after all.” Steve’s eyes are teasing, but then he’s serious. “We just don’t have enough trusted information to say, ‘Yes, this is what I believe or not.’”
Carole states that there is a warming trend for October. (The Huebners have had a weather station on their hill since about 20 years. “And that concerns me.” Then again, she adds, the temperatures this summer never even broke 100.
“So there you go,” Steve says. “We almost right now are neutral as to what we’re seeing and what it’s caused by.”
He finishes his coffee.
“Cycles,” he says, “and in some ways I’m still leaning that way. So I guess the verdict is still out.”
This AtlanticPlanet story was funded by the HHMI Department of Science Education.
