By Mike Smith
A Survey of Television Weathercasters: When Politics Outweighs Science
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has departed from the mission of its first 80 years, which was to advance and disseminate meteorological knowledge. The Society has wandered from that mission to one of advocacy related to the politics and public opinion pertaining to climate change. There has been no vote of the members of the Society on this change of emphasis.
As part of its advocacy on climate change, the AMS periodically takes a number of actions to influence the public, political leaders and its members. Those include briefings in Washington, DC, press releases, “policy statements,” and even pressure on individual members to a espouse views concordant with the so-called “consensus” pertaining to catastrophic global warming.
For example, I received a call from the Executive Director of the Society, during which he urged me to stop writing articles on my blog that raised questions about aspects of the science and politics of climate change. I declined to comply. Coincidentally, I had resigned from the Society two weeks prior to the call because of these types of activities.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss a new survey of weathercasters taken by the AMS. The preliminary version of the survey is published here: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00206.1 prior to its formal, peer-reviewed publication in the print version of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The survey, conducted by the American Meteorological Society and George Mason University, is designed to influence society members and the public through publication and discussion beyond the AMS and its membership. See, for example, https://blogs.agu.org/blog/2017/07/15/weathercasters-views-climate-change-dramatically-shift/ ).
In contrast to the near-yearly polling pertaining to global warming, I was a member of the Society from 1966 to 2016 and during that time I do not recall any poll of the membership, or any subset of the membership, on scientific issues more central to the AMS’s mission that were debated in the public arena. For example, there was no poll as to whether Hurricane Sandy should have been considered a hurricane at the time it made landfall, a subject of some debate within our science, and of some importance to both policy makers and to the business community.
