Broadcast meteorologists assume responsibility for communicating the effects on climate change

Local

“If there’s a meteorologist out there who doesn’t feel comfortable talking about climate science, they’re missing the boat.”

As headlines warn about the potential consequences of the accelerating climate crises, more attention is being paid to the rapidly increasing impacts. dire consequencesOf the warming planet. 

With the evidence of the crisis piling up, broadcast meteorologists — often considered the scientists or science experts in their newsrooms — are taking up the job of communicating information about the crisis to the viewers tuning in for their daily forecasts.

That doesn’t mean that the weather forecasters are talking about the climate crisis on a daily basis. Boston.com spoke with three local broadcast meteorologists, who said they are trying to provide context for the weather in relation to climate.

“At the end of the day, we’re meteorologists; we’re not climatologists,” said Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist WBZ TV. “But we’re probably the most qualified person to talk about what’s happening with the climate that the average person is going to encounter on a daily basis. There aren’t a lot of climatologists who are out there walking around and able to address some of these things.”

Meteorologists are well suited to communicating to the public about climate change since the forecasters “do spend a good amount of time” studying the crisis because it applies to their job responsibilities, Fisher said.

“It affects all of us over time,” he said.

All Boston meteorologists stated that taking on the role as communicators about climate change is a function that they have done for many years and that they will continue to grow as the crisis continues. 

‘It’s all becoming clearer‘

Dave Epstein, a meteorologist, whose work is carried on CBS Boston, WBUR and The Boston Globe, stated that the way forecasters approach climate change has changed over the years. 

“If you talked to meteorologists 20 years ago, I think you would have found more skepticism in the meteorological community, especially those of us who were on-air in front of cameras, on radio,” he said. “I think that one of the things that’s changed over the past couple of decades as we’ve gotten more and more data that clearly shows the human impact on the climate, I think we have really begun to incorporate it when appropriate into our broadcasts.”

Michael Page is a meteorologist who produced forecasts on NECN, NBC10 Boston and most recently, now reports for The Weather Channel. He also runs the Weather Blog. FlawlessForecast.com, agreed. 

Just in the last 10 years alone, he said the tone of the stories he’s done has changed. 

A decade ago, he said he and others were still using hypotheticals, telling viewers, “Hey, this could happen.”

“Now, fast forward 10 years and some of those changes are already well underway or even a little worse than we thought, like sea-level rise for example,” Page said. “In Boston, it’s now very routine to see Long Wharf flood on a sunny day with a particularly high tide. That’s something that 10 years ago we weren’t seeing, and now all of a sudden we are seeing it. So the tone of the storytelling has changed.”

Now the tone is, “Hey, this is happening already, you can see it with your own eyes, I’m showing you,” he said.

Page stated that it is possible to communicate to viewers in different ways how common events and impacts will become.

“In the last decade, there’s so much more clarity as to sea level rise, temperature climbs,” he said. “It’s all becoming clearer because we have better data.”

Fisher stated that meteorologists are now more interested in it. 

It’s now more a daily routine, as opposed to something that would just be mentioned in a year-end or month-end report.

“I remember when I was starting in the business, it was just kind of at the beginning of green reporting and doing stories on renewable energy or on the climate in general was just kind of starting,” Fisher said. “And now it’s just become very commonplace because we’ve learned so much over time.”

Page noted that technology has also changed over the years, which means meteorologists are much better equipped to predict extreme weather events that are happening — and that will continue to happen — as climate change unfolds.

When the Hurricane Ida remnants arrived in the northeast last summer, he said forecasters had the tools they needed to predict that the storm was going to bring the kind of “freakishly heavy rain” that is becoming more common with climate change, Page said. 

“We have the tools to pinpoint that a day, a day and a half beforehand,” he said. “We knew there was going to be tremendous amounts of rain around New York City.”

At least 43 people were murdered13 deaths occurred in New York City, New Jersey and Pennsylvania during Ida.

Page said he doesn’t think people understood the forecasts meteorologists were delivering or what 8 inches of rain in just a couple of hours would mean for the city.

“We were able to say, ‘This is going to be a really bad flood event in the New York City area,’” he said. “We knew this was going to happen. Unfortunately, like I said, people didn’t necessarily know how to take that information. That’s where we still can get better … Maybe we as meteorologists need to do better and say [with these events], ‘OK if you do live in a basement, you’re going to flood,’ like explicitly tell people this is what it’s going to look like.”

Page said the problem he and his colleagues run into is that people often tell them they’ve seen extreme weather in their lifetimes before. 

“People say, ‘Oh, we’ve seen that before, I know what that’s like, I know what that storm is like,’” Page said. “But it’s like, no, you haven’t. Maybe you haven’t ever seen 8 inches rain fall in just a few hours. And what that does for a city. With our technology, we can see these extreme events coming when we have them on paper. The problem is that we might not have seen it with our eyes. We have to paint the picture. So it’s a hard thing. We have the data in front of us, we know it’s going to be bad, but what does that look like?”

Following events, like Ida as an example, Page said now both forecasters and the public know what that looks like for a city to see 8 inches of rain in just a few hours when it “inevitably happens again.”

“Something hypothetical is harder to take seriously and take action on than if you can see it or you know you have a history with it,” Page said.

‘I’m not telling you what to believe’

But just because there is more data available, improved technology, and greater certainty about how the effects of climate change will be felt, Fisher, Page, and Epstein agreed that the crisis isn’t necessarily impacting or changing the way meteorologists approach their work on a day-to-day basis. 

They stated that climate and weather are not the same.

Epstein stated that every extreme weather event is not climate change.

“I would never say, ‘Oh, this cold snap is climate change or this warm day in the middle of March is climate change,’” he said. 

Epstein stated that his primary job is not to provide a daily climate assessment but rather to find the moments when he is able to give additional context or information to his audience about the ways in which what they are seeing on a daily base may have changed or may continue changing as climate changes.

He stated that it was important to explain to the public that some weather patterns we are seeing will change as the climate changes. 

“So we may see more warm nights, we may see more warm winter days,” Epstein said. “We might see more extreme rainfall. Extreme rainfall events have happened for hundreds and hundreds of years … but these types of events, the frequency of them and the way they occur changes as climate changes. So I think inserting that into the discussion in a two-and-a-half to three-minute broadcast is how we approach it.”

According to the broadcasters, meteorologists approach their forecasting in the same way. 

But today, compared to 20 years ago, Epstein said climate change and its “fingerprints” are always in the background. 

“If I see a week of really hot and humid weather coming, I might think this may be more intense than it would have been 30 years ago,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that 30 years ago that you wouldn’t have seen a hot and humid week. It’s just that how it manifests itself will be slightly different.”

Epstein says that climate is what you have in your closet. Day-to-day weather, on the other hand, is what you have available to you.

The idea is that the clothes you have in your closet may change. So, as the temperature rises, you may find yourself wearing fewer sweaters or more shorts. 

“That doesn’t mean you’re not going to need a heavy sweater, you just might not need it as much,” Epstein said. “And you may need the shorts more.”

This background of climate is what has changed forecasting for meteorologists, he said.

Fisher stated that CBS Boston is very good at incorporating climate context. Blue Hill ObservatoryParticularly, the region of, which has the longest climate history in North America. 

Meteorologists at CBS Boston share the observatory’s statistics, using the facility’s data to inform viewers about the context for months or stretches when there are extreme weather events.

“Last year, being one of the warmest years on record in the area, we show how things have changed over time,” Fisher said. “How things are loaded toward being warmer and not colder. And we see at Blue Hill we’ve had a number of these top kind of warmest months in the last ten months, but top ten coldest just basically not existing anymore. So we try to have that dialogue.”

Fisher said that it is important to share this context and information on climate trends because it has an impact on how people plan their gardens or build infrastructure. 

“People want to know what obstacles they might be facing down the road, years from now,” he said.

Meteorologists offer forecasts that include climate awareness. However, they also provide reporting on specific impacts of crisis, mitigation efforts, and other stories. 

Page wrote a report in recent years that examined the situation. Climate cost of the food we purchase at grocery stores. Meanwhile, at CBS Boston, Fisher said the station’s whole team of meteorologists tries as often as possible to produce reports for their series “Eye on Earth,”From the impact of Climate change and cranberry bog harvestsMassachusetts is the place to go to learn about the efforts to establish a wind farm off Martha’s Vineyard. 

Epstein, Fisher, Page and Fisher all agreed that their job was to communicate about weather and what climate change might mean for viewers. It is not, they said, to veer into advocating for any specific action — political or otherwise — for what needs to happen in response to the climate crisis. 

Fisher said he likes to offer viewers the data and explain what is known, what’s being seen, how it’s being recorded, and what can be expected to change as a result. This allows viewers, whether they are policy makers or the general voter, to make their own decisions and choices based on the data.

“To me it’s not really something that we’re debating,” Fisher said. “It’s something that we’ve honestly noticed. If you spend a lot of time outside or if you spend a lot of time looking at the data, it’s very clear that the climate is much warmer here than it used to be. And then I let people decide what they want to do with that information.” 

In sticking to the data and the science, Page and Epstein said they don’t have any concerns about alienating viewers. 

“I tell people all the time, I’m not telling you what to believe,” Page said. “I am telling you the science. So if you don’t believe the science, then I can’t help you.”

Yes, there are still people out there who respond, despite the data that exists, with quips that there’s no climate change if there is a cold day in May, Epstein said. 

“But that’s just ignorant and they’re just trying to be trolls,” he said. “To me it’s just noise.”

The meteorologists generally agreed that New England viewers have been mostly enthusiastic and receptive to their approach to covering and discussing climate change. 

They pointed out that this is not the same situation as their colleagues in other parts of the country.

“We’re very lucky to be able to just deliver information here and people will have interest in it,” Fisher said. “I do know that our colleagues in other parts of the nation, they get death threats, they get nasty calls, emails, people harass them because they bring it up just to show data in their local markets. So it is not the same everywhere in the U.S. as it is here in the Boston area.”

‘We are a connection and someone that they know‘

Fisher stated that broadcast meteorologists are well-suited to talk about climate change because their job is communication. 

“You need that third party, you need that person who can learn the material, who knows the topic, but then can also boil it down and just talk about it in a very simple way,” he said. “Because most people are not going to read the literature, the journals, and a lot of science publications. And even if they did read it, they’d have no idea what’s going on because it’s heavy stuff. It’s not written for the general public.”

That’s where broadcast meteorologists, who often already serve as sounding boards in their newsrooms for topics related to the earth sciences generally, have the opportunity to come in. 

Meteorologists, Fisher pointed out, are already working in an area of science where they are taking something complex and boiling it down to succinct directions for the public — when to plow, when to plan the garden, when to head to the beach.

“Our job isn’t to give you the calculus, it’s to give you the forecast,” he said. “And with climate science … our job is to say here’s the path we’re on, here’s what it means for you. And how we might be able to change it, possibly.”

He explained that meteorologists are like a general contractor and climatologists are specialists in their trades, such as a plumber. 

Meteorologists can also be general contractors, which means they can be great messengers to deliver the information to their local communities.

“Meteorologists have a good background knowledge of all that information, they’re studying it, they’re reading up on it, they’re following their local trends … It’s kind of boiling down something that’s very complex into something that’s more digestible and usable for anyone who’s watching and to be a sounding board if people have questions,” Fisher said.