Tag: Topper Shutt

The DC area's forecast for Friday calls for temperatures near 60 degrees with thunderstorms. In January.

But you won't catch our television weather presenters attributing the bizarre forecast to global warming loading the dice for extreme weather! No, sir! Expect to hear lots of things like, "Wow, tropical weather in January. Uh ... weird!"

If they mentioned our changing climate, they might get angry calls from viewers who find climate reality doesn't fit in with their political views. Here in the DC area, unless your name is Bob Ryan, you're likely to figure it's better to keep quiet about the facts than risk standing up for inconvenient truths. Or maybe, like Topper Shutt, you're a climate science denier yourself.

Learn more about why some TV weathermen aren't straight with their viewers about climate science at ForecastTheFacts.org.

WUSA-TV Chief Meteorologist Topper Shutt, last covered here giving a shout-out to climate science deniers, blogged recently about the DC region's warm November temperatures:

It was 73 on [November 14], just four shy of the record high and is still mild today but changes are on the way which is what November is all about. November typically features wide temperature fluctuations in the Metro Area. Temperature swings of highs 10 degrees above average one day can be followed by days with high temperatures 10 degrees below average all in the same week.  Although rare, it has snowed in November in the Metro Area (we were reminded it can snow in October as well) while November has also seen temperatures in the mid 70s. There have been instances of both extremes that Washingtonians have experienced on this date in the not too distant past.

To use a local example, this would be like writing an article about the recent history development in Arlington's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and saying, "Some buildings are short while others are tall." While that's true, it also would be completely ignoring the easily perceived upward trend.

Just look at the global temperature trend. Or to get local as the Capital Weather Gang did, look at DC's Thanksgiving temperature trend:

Look, WUSA TV-9's Topper Shutt is an excellent meteorologist, but his expertise is in short-term forecasting, not long-term climate modeling. And, just as I don't think Topper would like it if a climate scientist or a clean energy expert/businessperson/etc. casually, and without any proof, dismissed meteorology as a field, something tells me that climate scientists and folks in the clean energy industry don't appreciate him doing exactly that to them. Case in point: yesterday's and today's blog posts by Shutt, both on the issue of climate change and environmental/energy challenges more broadly. In the first column, entitled "World's Biggest Threat," the WUSA-TV chief meteorologist strays outside his swim lane, and in doing so, makes a number of egregrious errors. For instance, there's so much wrong with sentences like the following, it's hard to know where to start. Here are a few examples (in bold) with my comments (in italics).

*"Some would have us believe that 'global warming', or now as it is called 'climate change' is our biggest threat to humanity."
That's just silliness; as NASA explains, "global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming....Hansen's testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded." The thing is, though, "temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate," and for this reason, "'global climate change' is the more scientifically accurate term." That's not so hard to undrestand, now is it Mr. Shutt?