Poor KCCI-TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger is quitting because viewer criticism of his slots hyping climate change propaganda while he was supposed to be giving local weather reports became too unbearable. Well good, except that he should have been fired first.
“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in his interview with The Associated Press.
Except that’s not his job. He is a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and isn’t qualified to “connect” the dots. Weather isn’t climate, and while climate change activists find ways to connect virtually any kind of weather to the climate change doom watch, that is not what people tune into weather reports to hear. For me, it’s in the same category as NFL players using games to protest social policy.
What Gloninger was using a local TV weather segment to advance a political and policy agenda that he approved of. Ethics foul. I don’t want lectures on race relations from my coffee barrista, and I don’t want climate change theories from my weather reports.
Apparently there were some nutcases sending Gloninger threatening email and death threats, but excessive responses to unethical conduct don’t make the conduct more ethical. His broadcasts were an abuse of power, position and influence making the TV audience dumber: most members of the public think meteorologists have special expertise in climate science. They don’t. Just like your typical woke politician, this guy was taking as discovered truth what other scientists were claiming, and regurgitating it to sway public opinion when he should have been reporting the weather.
Naturally, being a propaganda messenger itself, the AP writes,
Gloninger’s experience is all too common among meteorologists across the country who are encountering reactions from viewers as they tie climate change to extreme temperatures, blizzards, tornadoes and floods in their local weather reports. For on-air meteorologists, the anti-science trend that has emerged in recent years compounds a deepening skepticism of the news media. Many meteorologists say it’s a reflection of a more hostile political landscape that has also affected workers in a variety of jobs previously seen as nonpartisan…
Indeed, it affects workers in jobs previously seen as non-partisan because those jobs are supposed to be non-partisan. Unfortunately, there are newly minted social justice warriors like this weatherman who decide to bring politics into their work when it is outside both their duties and expertise. Nor is criticism of Gloninger “anti-science.” What is anti-science is the weatherman’s half-baked science, tying local weather events to world-wide climate projections. The negative reaction isn’t “all-too common”; what’s too common is station managers not telling meteorologists to stay within their sphere of competence.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack wrote:
The Des Moines Climate Change Propagandist Weatherman Is Quitting. He Should Have Been Fired.
Fired for parroting the approved narrative, engaging in pseudoscience, and preaching the Religion of Climate Change to people expecting a weather forecast analysis?
Nonsense. He was just being a good progressive, doing exactly AOC et. al. tell him he should be doing — using is platform for “good,” even if it means pissing off a few hundred thousand “deplorables.”
I’d imagine station management would’ve given him a raise if he’d asked.
Weather isn’t climate! One of my favorites. It should always be followed by “EXCEPT WHEN WE SAY IT IS! Then it’s climate.” So, any time there’s an “extreme weather event” (the existence of which is arrived at solely by our expert betters. “Science!”), that weather is climate! Tah-dah! Assholes.
The 05:30 CDT NBC National News aired a segment about the flooding in New York State.
The i>On The Scene reporter was wearing a baseball cap which blazed: NBC Climate Unit.
(sarcasm)
There is no end to the anti-science of the right wing. First, they complain about teachers and librarians grooming their kids, now they are complaining about meteorologists scaremongering people about ‘extreme weather events’. When will they stop opposing ‘the science’?
As a central Iowan and long-time viewer of KCCI, a LONG-TIME viewer – since Connie McBurney did weather on what looked like those flannel-graph boards from church in the 1970s and 80s and John McLaughlin followed after her – there are few things more pleasurable than seeing Gloninger gone.
It’s disgraceful that some people threatened Chris. Why not just write the station and tell them “we’re done with KCCI until he’s gone?” There is no reason to turn the man into a martyr.
You actually don’t know that people ‘threatened’ him (although they might have”. Saying ‘We’re done with your station until you fire him.” could easily be reported as violence or threatening his life these days.
That may be true, though the original post does mention “threatening email and death threats”. But your point is well taken. In a day where “words = violence” by many on the Left, any email that mocked or derided or simply said “shut your mouth about climate change before it gets smacked” (which could have come from the guy’s mom) might be taken as a actual threat of violence.
It used to be the delivering the weather report was considered something of a fluff assignment often given to and attractive but otherwise airheaded “weather girl” who was certainly not a meteorologist. The weather always came at the end of the broadcast, and seeing the weather girl was your reward for not clicking away after sports. On a practical level, whoever was delivering the weather was supposed to tell you what the weather next day was going to be, so that you knew whether you were going to have to… sorry, be able to watch your daughter twirl her baton and your son blow his tuba in the parade, or if that was all going to be rained out, or if you were going to need to get out your raincoat and umbrella and put on your old shoes before you headed to work. That’s all it’s supposed to be, not climate change propaganda from someone who is probably completely ignorant of the science behind it. Of course that didn’t stop Bill Weir, who majored in creative writing in those nothing about science, from writing his puke-worthy climate change lament addressed to his newborn son River, in which he revealed the circumstances of his son’s conception to the world.
However, in this day and age in which literally everything has become political, and you can’t watch a business report without hearing about which company is the ethical versus the unethical one to invest in, and you can’t watch a sports report without every game turning into a commercial for Black Lives Matter, I guess it should not come as a surprise that you can’t watch the daily weather report without hearing climate change propaganda with information on temperature and precipitation.
The thing is, most ordinary people, or at least more ordinary people than used to are getting tired of this. We’re now going on 3 years of woke government and every kind of leftist propaganda there is while the economy tanks and stays tanked. The woke have no one to blame but themselves now. They can’t point the finger at the orange man and say this is all his fault. What’s more, the ordinary people are now turning to the woke and saying, “is this all you’ve got?” Where is the economic improvement? Where are the prospects for the future? Don’t tell me that now you’re going to turn my life upside down.
Maybe at this point the right wing counterparts to the who were burning and trashing and looting this nation three years ago have finally been roused to action. It starts with the threatening of climate change pushing weathermen, and then it may well move to going after woke teachers and gunning down loud mouth woke politicians. It’s unwise to think you are going to spend your entire life as an executioner and not think the ax might not one day cut off your head as well.
Oh yes, and this garbage about more conservative people being anti-science or afraid of smart people is just that, garbage. The woke are just starting to realize that although they can dominate certain fields, what they can’t do is compel attendance or agreement or consumption. Major League sports were one thing, because there is no comparable competition. However, it’s turning out not to be so with retail sales, alcoholic beverages, and other fields. With the cresting and receding of the George Floyd freak out, a lot of businesses are coming to the realization that Republicans buy things too and it’s unwise to alienate them when others won’t get involved in the culture wars and will snap up that business. This is also why suddenly Lucasfilm and Disney are hemorrhaging money and latest movies have gone from okay to struggling to failures. Everyone knows what they’re selling, and no one is in the mood right now for yet another story of a previously well-liked hero now old and did her and ready to be replaced by some insufferable Mary Sue. The right and conservative people are not dead, and there’s a good chance that it’s all going to come roaring back next year, with a certain orange man in the lead.
Many broadcast weather people seek the American Meteorological Society “Seal of Approval,” which either explicitly or implicitly requires the subscription to the gospel of Climate Change. Some broadcast meteorologists reject this and don’t seek the “Seal” while some broadcast outlets apparently make it a condition of employment. Some reject this pressure and leave; Joe Bastardi, formerly head of forecasting at AccuWeather, left this lucrative gig at Penn State and began his own company, as an example, which I believe is successful. For more on the AMS Seal, here’s a link you might find interesting:
https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/education-careers/careers/ams-professional-certification-programs/certified-broadcast-meteorologist-program-cbm/
MB