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On Monday, John Morales, a veteran meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, was on air tracking the progression of Hurricane Milton, which the National Hurricane Center had just described as a category 5 storm. “It has dropped fifty millibars in ten hours,” Morales said. This technical language might not in itself have been very memorable, but the way Morales said it was: his voice trembling; his eyes red. “I apologize,” he said. “This is just… horrific.” Keeping his composure, Morales talked about the storm’s wind speeds and the fact that it was gaining strength as it passed over “record hot” waters in the Gulf of Mexico. “You know what’s driving that, I don’t need to tell you,” Morales said. “Global warming. Climate change.”
Morales told other news outlets afterward that the climate emergency, and his frustration that the world has not done more to curb it, contributed to his emotional moment on air, in addition to his shock and fear about Milton’s intensification and the people in its path. According to the New York Times, Morales has long worked to incorporate climate science into his day-to-day weather forecasts, but the moment reflected “a recent shift” in his approach—from “striving to be a ‘non-alarmist’ weathercaster to one who freely admits to being horrified by the mounting threats of global warming.” Not all viewers have taken kindly to this approach: after Hurricane Helene, itself a devastating storm, made landfall last month, Morales wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where he is a columnist, that one person responded to his warnings by calling him a “climate militant.” “Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me,” Morales wrote. “That’s why they bicker and accuse me of overhyping emerging weather threats.”
As Helene hit, followed by Milton—which was not as destructive as some of the early signs had portended, but was still one of the strongest storms ever to hit Florida, killing at least a dozen people—some of the conspiracy theorizing around them made accusations of climate militancy or doom-mongering look mild: the storms have given rise to a flood of absurd mis- and disinformation, boosted by a legion of online grifters and politicians including Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who suggested that a shady, official “they” are controlling the weather. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said earlier this week that the disinformation had reached levels she’d never seen before, and was impeding response efforts; The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote yesterday that the storms have “offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.” Meteorologists have been on the front lines of dealing with all this. According to Rolling Stone, some have even reported receiving death threats. (For at least one reader, this fact brought to mind a Simpsons episode in which a direct hit from a comet is averted and Moe the bartender says, “Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again!”)
And yet Morales and others persisted in making the link between the recent storms and the changing climate—and in doing so, furthered a broader recent trend of TV meteorologists using their perches to connect weather science and climate science. In 2019, Lucy Schiller profiled one such meteorologist for CJR: Eric Sorensen, then of WQAD News 8 in the Quad Cities area that straddles the border of Iowa and Illinois. “Broadcast meteorologists have an unusual ability to guide people as they head out into the weather that’s going to define their day,” Schiller wrote; compared with other types of media figures, they have operated from a starting point of high public trust. Sorensen’s efforts to use this trust to communicate about the wider climate emergency received some pushback; even one of his producers was concerned that viewers wouldn’t care about it during a period of disastrous local flooding. But Meaghan Parker, the executive director of the Society for Environmental Journalists, told Schiller that the more meteorologists do it, the more people can accept it as “a new normal.”
Taking a tour through the online lies around Helene and Milton, it can be hard to feel hopeful that such work is cutting through. But angry distrust of expertise and the instinct to shoot the messenger are not new American phenomena. (Moe wanted to burn down the observatory in 1995.) And, if a depressing number of people don’t—or, as Warzel deftly notes, actively won’t—believe the science, it is resonating with many others, even if their voices might not be as loud. Morales noted to the Washington Post this week that “climate denialists make up only a small percentage of the US population”; he told the New York Times that after his emotional on-air moment went viral, he received a great deal of support, especially from younger people on TikTok. “Sound and savvy science communication may be one of the keys to lift us out of the abyss,” Morales wrote yesterday, in a column for NBC6. “Scientists and other experts need to meet people where they’re at. If this week’s viral video showed my humanity, then I may be closer to that goal than ever.”
These days, there’s even a meteorologist in Congress: Sorensen, who now represents Illinois’s Seventeenth Congressional District as a Democrat. “As the trusted source of information for 20 years in my district, as the meteorologist, I talked about changing climate in a different way,” he told Roll Call last month, before Helene and Milton thundered in. “For me, it wasn’t about polar bears. It’s not about sea level rise. It’s about what’s happening outside people’s windows.” That, too, is increasingly undeniable—no matter how much some people might try. You can read Schiller’s ever-resonant profile of Sorensen here.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, Trump called for CBS to lose its broadcast license over the way it edited a recent 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; Jessica Rosenworcel, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, said in response that this isn’t how the agency works, and that while Trump’s attacks on TV stations “may now be familiar,” they are “serious and should not be ignored.” Trump, of course, backed out of talking to 60 Minutes; this week, he also nixed the idea of a second debate with Harris, as the deadline to accept an invitation from CNN passed. Harris will now do a town hall on CNN instead; it remains to be seen if Trump will also do one. Both Harris and Trump have agreed to do town halls on Univision. Harris’s was broadcast last night; Trump’s was pushed back to next week after Milton disrupted preparations in Miami.
- CJR’s Sacha Biazzo digs into problems at Global Press, a nonprofit that trains women journalists in the developing world. “Facing the same kind of funding crunch that has affected many other nonprofit newsrooms, Global Press is terminating the contracts of thirty-seven reporters, all in low- or moderate-income countries, by the end of the year,” and has laid off other employees and contractors, Biazzo writes. Twelve former staffers, seven of whom were recently let go, “described an idealistic venture that has had some successes but overpromised and underdelivered, with a disorganized editorial strategy and a toxic work culture permeated with fear and secrecy.” (“It takes a lot to change an institution,” the group’s founder and CEO said.)
- Yesterday, the government of Ukraine confirmed that Viktoria Roshchyna—an independent journalist who went missing last year while reporting in Russian-occupied territory in the country, and was later confirmed to be in Russian detention—has died. She was twenty-seven. Ukrainian officials said that Roshchyna was about to be included in a prisoner swap; Russia has not said what caused her death, which Ukraine is now investigating as a murder and a war crime. “Nothing could stop Vika if an idea was born in her head,” one of her former editors said. “Vika has always been where the most important events for the country took place.”
- This week, Russia’s internet regulator announced that it is banning Discord, a communications platform popular with gamers that Russia’s own military has used to coordinate battlefield movements in Ukraine. The ban “highlights a glaring technology lapse within the Russian military,” the Post reports. “More than 2½ years into the war, it has failed to implement a secure, dependable Russian-made communications system, instead relying on privately owned platforms such as Discord and Telegram.” Pro-invasion bloggers “ridiculed the move,” which apparently blindsided troops.
- And Business Insider’s Jacob Shamsian reports on how lawyers for the Times are inspecting the source code of ChatGPT—part of an unusual discovery process in the paper’s copyright lawsuit against the tool’s maker, OpenAI. The lawyers can only examine the code in a secure facility using computers disconnected from the internet; they can copy their notes and share them with up to five outside experts, but if they want to ask OpenAI’s CEO about a copied line of code, it gets destroyed afterward.
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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.