Global Warming: The Weather Channel Caper

The Global Warming Nazis have now infiltrated even the formerly reliable Weather Channel. Have they no decency? Observes Melanie Morgan:

Far-left political ideologies are being promulgated through ever-increasing mediums, and recently I noticed that a once-vaunted American television network, The Weather Channel, had succumbed to the cancerous spread of liberalism.

The Weather Channel debuted in 1982 and went on to earn a reputation as a well-known and respected cable network. The explosive success of the cable channel prompted the publication of a book marking the network's 20th anniversary. That success has been based on the fact that weather forecasts are sought after by a vast number of Americans on a near-daily basis.

What had been nice about The Weather Channel is that through most of its history it stayed clear of political propaganda and focused on delivering weather forecasts to the nation, supplemented with riveting live reports from the front lines of hurricanes, winter blizzards and springtime floods.

But no more. The Weather Channel is now engaged in a con job on the American people, attempting to scare the public that their actions are destroying the planet by creating a global warming crisis.

Yep, the Gramscians in the MSM have infiltrated the once informational and reliable Weather Channel and now are running full-tilt to turn it into yet another propaganda organ for the left. Read on:

The move away from scientific forecasting of the weather to sensationalized leftist political advocacy is in part due to the influence of Wonya Lucas, executive vice president and general manager of The Weather Channel Networks.

Lucas admitted in a recent interview with Media Village that the reprogramming of The Weather Channel was influenced by her tenure at CNN when that network shifted from presenting straight news to personality-driven programming.

Lucas decided that what was good for CNN was good for The Weather Channel, and the objectivity and respectability of the network has now been thrown out the window. It doesn't matter that CNN's turn to the left has caused their ratings to plummet; The Weather Channel's embraced its model.

Media Village reported that the move by The Weather Channel "is intended to establish a broader perspective on the weather category and, says Lucas, to move the brand from functional to emotional."

Emotional weather forecasting?

The Weather Channel is launching a new website and broadband channel dedicated solely to global warming called "One Degree" and has a weekly program called "The Climate Code," devoted almost entirely to liberal advocacy on climate matters.

The network is running advertisements showcasing scared and confused Americans, including children and senior citizens, wondering about the coming apocalypsecaused by global warming. (You can view the ad for yourself here.)

This nonsense is being promulgated by one of the Weather Channel's heavily hyped new hires, Dr. Heidi Cullen. Okay, maybe she does have a doctorate. (So does Wonker.) But she appears to have done the bulk of her work at reliably Communist Columbia University, well known for accepting no dissention in its Stalinist ranks, and her early work appears to have provided just enough nuttiness to establish bona-fide idiotarian credentials:

The chief martyr for the new "emotional" approach to broadcasting at The Weather Channel is Dr. Heidi Cullen, who serves as the network's cheerleader for global warming hysteria. Cullen's supposed expertise on climatology includes, among other things, earning a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College. One must indeed have to believe in the mystical to accept anything Ms. Cullen has to say about climatology.

Writing for the One Degree blog, Ms. Cullen recently threw a hissy fit that some meteorologists are openly questioning the conclusions drawn by the Greenpeace crowd about the nature, extent, causes and even existence of global warming.

Cullen's diatribe, titled "Junk Controversy Not Junk Science," called on the American Meteorological Society to start requiring all meteorologists to toe the line on liberal interpretation of global warming, or else lose the organization's certification.

Following the link gets us to Heidi's ugly, thinly-veiled (and illogical) threat:

Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.

Horse-hockey. Once again, we have lefties trying to subvert a credentialing process in order to disallow dissenters from leftist orthodoxy from participating in the discussion, this time a scientific discussion. But parse the initial statement above: "Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms." Thus, they must avoid "junk controversy" (i.e., questioning the lefty, Kyoto Protocol version of "global warming") and favor "science" (i.e., the received orthodoxy of the left, mainly that George Bush and Halliburton are destroying the planet and are solely responsible for what is actually a natural phenomenon of cyclical climate change.)

Cullen's observation is a non-sequitur that keeps on giving. Using her line of reasoning, delete "meteorologists" and "in the sciences" and substitute "attorneys" and "in the law" and now you can delete all conservative attorneys who are not leftist ideologues and prohibit them from appearing on TV. Or "reporters" trained "in journalism" and you can delete all Fox journlalists and their news shows. Simple, easy.

Cullen's idiotarian kowtowing to leftist orthodoxy, however, has succeeded like almost nothing else in arousing her opponents, as in this interesting link posted, of all places, on a U.S. Senate site hosted by that body's Committee on Environment and Public Works. Here, weatherman James Spann opines:

Well, well. Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh?

I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. [Italics by Wonker.]

But after this little tweak, Spann gets down to the real heart of the matter—the subversion of science by political ideologues trolling for grant money. Which of course, can't be obtained and/or replenished unless one uncovers something that can be trumpeted as a catastrophic, world-ending horror:

Here are the basic facts you need to know:

*Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab.

*The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe.

If you don’t like to listen to me, find another meteorologist with no tie to grant money for research on the subject. I would not listen to anyone that is a politician, a journalist, or someone in science who is generating revenue from this issue.

There you have it. The hard left funded by filthy (taxpayer-funded) lucre. What else could you expect? That's how they've managed to subvert so many of our cultural and educational institutions, not to mention the government, for all these years. The lesson here is that earmarks for oil exploration are horrible but earmarks for leftist ideologues posing as scientists are swell. BTW, we've run most of Spann's link here since it's been down for most of the day, indicating that Democrat staffers have been trying to snuff it off the air.

We've tangled with the "global warming" idiotarians here before and will probably have to deal with them again. Could very well be that the planet is warming up a bit these days, although California's wiped-out citrus growers and the millions shivering in the bitter cold tonight in Texas and Oklahoma might question just where this warming is occurring. Nonetheless, if Cadillac Escalades are contributing to this, we're talking about a miniscule percentage of the whole, which has been a periodic global phenomenon since the beginning of time. But the left would have you believe that you, and I, and yeah, SUV driver Al Gore, too, are solely responsible for a dubious planetary catastrophe that could easily be solved if we all rode bikes to work, drank soy milk, and deposed George W. Bush. How asinine is that?

Time to write or email the Weather Channel en masse and explain to them that their advertising empire will topple unless they evict the CNN troglodytes pushing this idiotic global warming meme. We want weather on the Weather Channel, not Storm Stories and recycled Greenpeace propaganda. Let 'em have it. We can get this crap every day in the Washington Post. Why do we need re-runs?