Aw, isn’t he caring! A supposedly professional meteorologist gained fans and social media hits by choking up as he covered Hurricane Hurricane Milton. Oooh, it was so big and scary!
Time to retire, John.
Now we know the professionalism rot that has crippled law, science, journalism, academia, politics, the judiciary and so many other fields has struck meteorologists. Morales’s job is, or was supposed to be, relaying information about weather phenomenon, not to show everyone how sensitive and frightened he is. There is no excuse for this, none, never. If you can’t broadcast the explosion of the Hindenburg, a fire, a bomb blast or a murder without either losing control of your emotions or, worse, virtue-signaling with them, then you are in the wrong job.
Furthermore, such a reaction seeds panic. It is as irresponsible as it in incompetent.
In an interview, Morales justified his tearful broadcast in various ways. Shock about the storm’s rapid intensification, he said. You’re a pro, allegedly: if you’re that shocked, then you don’t know weather sufficiently to analyze it for others. “Angst about the increasing number and the severity of extreme weather events.” What? I can just imagine President Roosevelt tearing up over what the nation was facing in the coming months of the Depression, or when we entered World War II. Experts are supposed to give the public confidence that our best and brightest are dealing with crises, not that they are freaking out.
Empathy for the people, the ecosystems and the creatures that would experience Hurricane Milton’s destructiveness, Morales added. Ah. He wants to show everyone he cares. He’s not paid to care; he’s paid to relay facts and analysis dispassionately and accurately. Finally, Morales said his tender feelings revealed his frustration “over society’s failure to mitigate the pollution that is heating the planet, despite scientific certainty that it is driving increasingly violent weather.”
So this was political theater. Again, that is not his job. He may have not always been crippled by his biases, but he is now, and worse, Morales doesn’t see anything wrong with that. To be fair, his colleagues on the news side greased this slippery slope, as increasingly hacky news readers, not just locally but on national networks like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, now routinely mug their way through newscasts and interviews, making it clear as glass how they feel about what they are reporting or who they are talking to. Remember all those choking-up news hosts announcing Hillary Clinton’s well-earned defeat in 2016? Now we’ve moved on supposed professionals getting emotional about hurricanes that they wish a dictator had prevented–theoretically— by sending the U.S. standard of living back to the caves.
The death of professionalism is a prelude to the death of trust.
I get choked up just thinking about it….
Ethics Alarms 
Yeah, I saw this clip and the comments were sickening also. I had similar thoughts on the lack of professionalism and you know what came to mind?
When Walter Cronkite announced Kennedy’s death. For a brief moment he couldn’t contain his emotions but quickly regained his composure and continued.
https://youtu.be/Ti3Mpv4fwt4?si=ocld82bQulxgYKg9
I nearly mentioned that in the post, and the point is, he quickly recovered himself, and, if you asked him about it afterwards, I’m sure he would say that it was a momentary lapse, and that he regretted it.
He lied. Plain and simple he lied. The number and severity of storms is not increasing and the intensity of any hurricane depends on differential temperatures. It is cold fronts meeting warmer fronts create wind and wind determines storm surge. I know that and I am not a meteorologist.
NASA and Britannica both disagree with you. I won’t say you’re lying. But you’re wrong.
It is likely that NASA has been manipulating temperature data for years to help generate a narrative. Go find Tony Heller’s website and/or his YT channel for mountains of detail. NASA should focus on space exploration, because its climate work inside the atmosphere is suspect at best.
Tony Heller is a geologist who has promoted conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting. He has no credibility on this or any other topic.
Ah, it seems you’re a toadie of Michael Mann, who has waged a one-man war on Heller for years. Mann has accused Tony of anti-semitism…Heller is Jewish. Mann has accused him of being a racist…Heller’s wife is a member of a minority. Mann has accused him of Sandy-Hook “trutherism”…Heller – who lived and worked in Sandy Hook – has taken issue with inconsistent police reports and President Obama’s response to the shooting, but that’s as far as it’s gone.
This is a pretty standard response of Mann…and by extension, anyone on the Left. When you’re without a good argument, default to racism or some other ad-hominem attack.
Try again.
My apologies, I missed the fact that the person to which I responded was removed further down in this thread.
Yeah, the combination of stating falsely that climate change has caused more and bigger hurricanes when that is one of the most commented upon failures of the doomsday models, and then arguing that the illegal immigration problem could be solved by making illegal immigrants legal is a super-ban worthy sequence. The latter triggers The Stupidity Rule.
“NASA and Britannica both disagree with you.”
NASA? The same NASA (along with the NOAA, and a number of other taxpayer-supported governmental entities) have been caught with a finger…nay, a ham fist… on the scale more than a few times.
It gets worse; there’s this:
“49 Former NASA Scientists Send A Letter Disputing Climate Change”
Heck, even the…um…Father of the Mother Gaia Theory (Dr. James Lovelock) has admitted that the hype, by himself included, is WAY OVERBLOWN.
”Scientist behind the Gaia hypothesis says ENVIRONMENT MOVEMENT DOES NOT PAY ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE FACTS and he was too certain in the past about rising temperatures” (bolds/caps/italics mine)
Lovelock, a self-styled “old-fashioned Green” says: “(Environmentalism has) become a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.”
PWS
But, Chris is correct, though.
The strength and/or severity of a hurricane can be tied to Gulf or ocean water temperatures combined with low pressure disturbances. Hurricanes are weather events that suck heat from tropical waters to fuel their strength. These storms form over the ocean or the Gulf often beginning as a tropical wave—a low pressure area that moves through the moisture-rich tropics, possibly enhancing shower and thunderstorm activity.
As the weather system moves across the tropics, warm ocean air rises into the storm, forming an area of low pressure underneath. This causes more air to rush in. The air then rises and cools, forming clouds and thunderstorms. Up in the clouds, water condenses and forms droplets, releasing even more heat to power the storm.
The causes of higher water temperatures are open to debate. Sarah, in this thread, does a great job arguing that the current anthropogenicity is not based on science but on politics and ideology. I, for one, question whether science is settled on anything, save and except gravity (especially because that stupid can of tomatoes fell from the counter and broke my toe!).
Here is an interesting Wikipedia page for the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scaling or rating system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale. This seems to be one rating system that is used in conjunction with other systems, much like gauging the magnitude of earthquakes and tornadoes.
So, simply declaring that human activity is the leading cause of stronger hurricanes is shortsighted and sophomoric.
jvb
Chris is not correct that the weatherman is a liar for saying that the number and severity of storms and hurricanes is increasing. He is relying on the scientific consensus, shared among the organizations I named above, and reporting their views. That isn’t a lie. Whether those organizations are right or not is a subject I will leave to the experts.
Do this again, and you’ll be banned. The incidence of hurricanes has not increased, despite constant “consensus claims” that they will. You can have an opinion but you can’t make up facts. First and Last warning.
I am not “making up facts.” I am citing claims by NASA and Britannica. You appear to be disputing those claims. I did not even argue that they were correct; I merely said that it wasn’t a lie to believe them, and to forward their claims.
Am I correct in interpreting your warning as saying that it is a bannable offense for someone on your blog to believe NASA is a more credible source of climate information than you are?
Not a Scientist is banned for posts like this one. The facts are that despite NASA’s propaganda, the prediction of more and stronger hurricanes hasn’t materialized. Making up facts is bad; being obstinate about them is worse.
Don’t reply if he , she or it tries to sneak in a comment—your response will go to SPAM hell along with that comment as soon as I see it.
You do agree that climate change has increased Hurricane intensity though right?
DD
Nope. I also don’t believe in Dracula, the personification of Death of Rats, or Batman. I like to keep my fiction section of my library separate from the non-fiction section.
There is significant evidence that there is neither intensification due to anthropomorphic global climate change or indeed anthropomorphic global climate change due to carbonification. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change due to carbonification is sketchy at best, most commonly found in highly fictionalized models of the earth’s environment that have significant failures at nearly every level.
Now, if we want to talk about how the state of Wyoming is on fire due to man’s actions, we can. Humans do affect our world, but the emission of carbon dioxide is rarely a factor worth discussing.
Are you a climatologist?
DD
I am not a climatologist, but it is amazing what a graduate education in the hard sciences teaches you about collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. It also teaches you a huge amount about reading scientific papers and cutting through the BS. I also had a large portion of my education focused on the proper way to use, create, and critique computer models of data. If I had submitted for my project required for my bachelor’s degree, a model that was as poor as those in most of the models that “prove” global warming, I’d be flipping burgers now.
I have witnessed first hand just how “research” changes by who is funding it. I have also witnessed first hand the thumb that politics puts on the scale of what conclusions are allowed to come from research. My entire department was denied funding for having the “wrong” conclusions and even for wanting to research the “wrong” things. We were shut down for merely asking questions like scientists are supposed to.
Yeaaaaa I think I’m going to go with the climatologists who, you know, study the climate on this one, but thanks for your opinion!
DD
“Are you a climatologist?“
From what I’ve read by Sarah B (all [IMO] tremendously enlightening!), my best sense is she’s not.
Certainly not of the same caliber as Al Gore, Jr., John Kerry, et al, leastways…
PWS
I find your unwillingness to compare me with Al Gore and John Kerry tremendously flattering. Thank you!
Ah thee ole’ red herring. Good one!
Appeals to authority are a stupid way to try to shut someone down. People who are not climatologists are able to gather climate data, examine it, and draw conclusions. And people who are not climatologists can detect crap when they read it and counter it with arguments of their own.
Sarah B. has far more knowledge about this subject than you can imagine. A search through the pages of this site would alert to you that fact very quickly.
Yeow!! I’m sorry about your toe. I bet that hurt like mad. Gravity pulled me from my bike while riding home from work last month, causing my left wrist to break. It’s real!!!
I still get mad, all these years (14.5) after my chances at a doctorate were destroyed by the “scientific” community for not toeing the party line and trying to publish data that disproved some of their conclusions, when people say there is “scientific certainty” that pollution causes stronger hurricanes. Anyone who says scientific certainty regarding the anthropogenicity of climate change is a moron and break downs on the air are unnecessary to determine as such. Also, the intensification of climate events by carbon dioxide has been pretty firmly debunked, to the degree that even the disreputable meteorologists (there are no reputable ones) who can at least pretend to be scientists agree.
Meteorologists sold out to politics and lost the right to be called scientists years ago. Indeed, they are no more accurate in their predictions for tomorrow, much less next week,than a magic eight ball most of the time, so why would we take them seriously on any conclusion?
That being said, I saw this and bet my husband that you’d call him unprofessional. I am glad I was not mistaken.
Great comment, Sarah. Thank you. Francis Menton has repeatedly and recently written about the data on hurricane intensity and severity. Somehow, people seem to think hurricanes were invented about the same time as Al Gore invented the internet. Have they ever figured out what sent the Spanish galleons to the floor of the Caribbean in the 1500s, spreading all that gold that divers recover from time to time? Or what destroyed the Spanish Armada? Or the history of the great hurricanes in the Florida Keys and Miami in the 1920s and ’30s?
This is a total strawman argument. No one thinks hurricanes are a recent invention.
However, many figures on the MAGA right are currently arguing that humans are “inventing” hurricanes and other weather events intentionally. Is that worthy of condemnation in your eyes?
Many? Or just a few complete fools and demagogues, like Marjorie Taylor Greene? Check the posts last week. Using the dumbest and most irresponsible members of a group to characterize that groups is unfair.
MTG has the full support of the leader of the Conservative Party in the U.S. Yet her views can’t be said to fairly reflect on conservatives?
You frequently hold Kamala Harris and Democrats responsible for things said by more radical Democrats.
This is a double standard.
1. Give me an example of holding Harris to the standard of endorsing positions she hasn’t endorsed.
2. But when Jamaal Bowman broke the law to delay a House vote and lied about it, Hakeem Jeffreys brushed it off. Yeah, I’ll hold Democrats responsible for that, and him.
3. The United States doesn’t have a “Conservative Party.” You must be thinking of Great Britain.
That’s at least a partial mischaracterization of what people are stating. No one “invents” hurricanes and I’ve not heard anyone on any side of the ideological spectrum make those claims…unless they’re loons (MTG might be one of those).
What some are pointing out is that government agencies have been attempting to manipulate weather phenomena – including hurricanes – for decades. And that’s not a conspiracy theory.
What can be debated – and not condemned – is the government’s end goals in those efforts and the feasibility of the work, all of which has cost the taxpayers over the years…and continues to cost us.
It isn’t necessarily meant to be a straw-man argument, that people on the left really think hurricanes were a recent invention. Instead it is a rhetorical device meant to show that they act as though hurricanes before a certain timeframe are to be ignored or never happened. We certainly have had worse hurricane seasons in the past. We will have lighter ones again, and we’ll have worse ones in the future. This can be said for nearly any point in human history.
Part of this issue, along with much of the “anthropogenic global climate change” argument, has to do with how the data is analyzed. Many times, we forget that urban sprawl, development, and gentrification worsen hurricane damage. If there are more people in an affected area, more people die. However, when we report death tolls, we forget that, often, the reason a particular storm kills so many as compared to when a similar storm went through, there were less people in the area of the similar storm. We also have that problem with damage estimates. Often, the previous hurricanes being compared to went through areas with less to damage and/or in better repair. There is a reason why the tornado that hit the trailer park in Wright did so much more damage than the one that hit the golf course in Laramie. One hits poorly made dense human dwellings, another hits mostly grass with a few well-built strong houses. So often, when hurricanes hit older and/or poorer areas, we hear about more devastation.
None of this is meant to make light of a hurricane’s impact, but we need to look at all the facts. There have been many worse hurricanes by objective standards. Comparatives that do not consider all the facts are worthless, but seem to be almost all of what we see out of the media.
“However, many figures on the MAGA right are currently arguing that humans are “inventing” hurricanes and other weather events intentionally.”
Many figures on the Warmalista AlarmaCYST Left have slobbered profusely, only to have those slobberings go up in a puff of Global Warming enhanced smoke; to wit:
BBC Forced To Retract False Claim About Hurricanes
(bolds/caps/italics mine throughout) “A warmer world IS bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and A GREATER RISK of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5.”
Paul Homewood (notalotofpeopleknowthat@wordpress.com) informed them of their ascientific assertion, and POOF, that sentence mysteriously disappeared.
Seems they forgot to add the necessary ingredient of COULDIFMAYMIGHT.
Anywho, in its stead:
“Scientists are still analyzing what this data will mean, but a warmer world MAY bring us a greater number of more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes and could bring more extreme rainfall.
”Correction 29 January 2018: This story has been updated to clarify that it is MODELLING rather than HISTORICAL DATA that predicts stronger and wetter hurricanes.
A retraction of an unsupportable claim about the Global Warming that’s here and worse than the models predicted?
That’s the first time THAT’S happened…so far today.
PWS
Galveston. It never recovered.
As I asked one of my leftists friends who called me concerned (I live in Florida), if Milton is the largest hurricane to strike Florida in 103 years, just how bad was climate change 103 years ago?
I guess people are too young to remember Andrew. And if a hurricane has a large wind field, so what? Most of it will only be tropical storm strength.
If this guy thought Milton was still going to be a Cat 5 when it made landfall, he is an idiot.
Yea that walter cronkite was definitely in the wrong job
DD
considering his reporting of the Vietnam conflict, I finally agree with you. Oh and my mom is fine thanks for asking.
Hey, good job! You actually issued a useful, textbook example of an obnoxious and self-indicting troll comment that is without substance, not constructive, and that only impugns the troll! Nobody suggested that there was anything inappropriate about Cronkite’s nanosecond of emotion having to announce the death by assassination of an American President who was a cultural force (and a father with two young children). It was a famous example of a TV taking head showing emotion, and famous at the time, but it was not intentional, it was brief, and Cronkite certainly was not proud of it, unlike the grandstanding weather man.
Do better.
If you can.
I was actually thinking about all of the alligators and crocodiles. And the squirrels and racoons. Wondering howany end up dead after big bad meanie storms.
Then I was laughing at the notion of seeing a bunch of large reptiles flying in the air of a tornado. Crocnado. Racoonnado. Sharknados is so yesterday.
https://babylonbee.com/news/i-tried-to-warn-you-cries-mtg-as-hurricane-forms-in-the-shape-of-the-star-of-david
For the record: I agree, here, and that makes me consistent.
Anyone want to take a step back and explain to me why this professional tearing up while reporting on Milton is both different and worse than the professor who hyperbolically suggested that people who wouldn’t vote for Kamala could be lined up and shot during his lecture?
Sure: a teacher’s professional duty is much broader and more discretionary than that of a TV expert hired for one one particular function only.
Really?
The difference is the soft bigotry of low expectations, where the expectation for professional behavior is higher for the weatherman than it is for a professor?
The weatherman can’t so much as choke up when reporting on a hurricane, but there’s no limit to what a professor can say in jest?
But we disagree about whether an obvious jest is somehow unprofessional or unethical conduct for a teacher, or an opinion expressed facetiously. No, a TV meteorologist doesn’t have that license, unless it is clear that he is “The Weeping Weatherman,” or an entertainer, like Willard Scott.
Apropos of this subject, a classic post from late great EA commenter slickwilly:
In the aftermath of Katrina in 2005, the Waramlista AlarmaCYSTS breathlessly intoned that in 2006, hurricanes would be more frequent and destructive!
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017: see! We told you so!!!!
PWS
”Climate Change is a progressive scam designed to transfer wealth to groups progressives favor (while getting rich themselves, in many cases)”
On that subject:
Former IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Chair Rajendra Pachuari, (a RR Engineer who writes porn novels in his spare time, and resigned IN DISGRACE in 2015 over sexual/physical harassment allegations) would prefer that not be discussed..
Why? He signed off on a real REAL scary prediction of the Himalayan Glaciers disappearing by 2035 in the UNIPCC Assessment Report # 4 (AR4).
Funniest thing; the REAL year was 2350 and the IPCC having to embarrassingly withdraw their erroneous claim and apologize is inconsequential.
Why 2.0? It accomplished what it was intended to accomplish; securing additional funding in the amount of $500 large for, amongst others, TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute).
TERI Director General? This is where it gets GOOD; none other than the talented Dr. Pachuari himself.
What are the odds, am I right?
Anywho, Pachuari replaced the widely respected Bob Watson ~2000 at the behest of a memo from EXXON-MOBIL.
Funniest thing, 2.0; it was determined that Pachuari would be ”friendlier” to business.
The type of “business” with whom he’d be friendlier is NOT a subject True Believers prefer to address.
It gets better.
A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate (tied to Pachauri) the TATA [insert raunchy rejoinder] Group, shuttered British Steelmaking concern Corus Redcar, throwing 1700 people out of work.
Why? To cash in on windfall profits of ~$2 billion by selling its carbon credits.
Well, Corus Redcar was an evil polluter after all, and those furloughed workers must have deserved their fate, right?
So, Pachuari really DID cut down on global pollution, yet the real GREEN ($) was due recompense for his…um…selfless efforts.
And a grateful Mother Gaia breathed a cautiously optimistic sigh of relief.
PWS
Several years back, much was made of a brief warm spell that reportedly melted nearly 12 billion tons of ice from Greenland in a single three-day period.
Sounds horrific, right?
Well, what they failed to include in the story was that the Greenland ice sheet is estimated to be 3,000 trillion tons.
So…divide 12 billion by 3, which nets you 4 billion tons of ice melt per day. Then divide 3,000,000,000,000,000 by 4 billion to get the number of days to melt the entire ice sheet. That’s…are you ready?…750,000 days. Divide that by 365.25 (days per year) and you’re at 2,053.5 years to melt the ice sheet.
Doesn’t sound quite as concerning, eh?
And that doesn’t even include the fact that the ice sheet has been maintaining or growing nearly every year since.
Climate alarmists are counting on two things: 1) Their cherry-picked numbers with no proper context will terrify you, and 2) you will do no research on your own.
…and don’t even get me started on US burn acres per year…
They’re not UNlike the dishonest waiter making change; always to their benefit.
PWS
What I find interesting AND alarming is that people are basing their climate change hysteria on that last 50 years of climate data. If the earth is 4 to 5 billion years old there has been many climate changes. We just weren’t around to experience them.
Yes, the intensity of recent hurricanes have increase because earth’s temperature has increased 1 degree warm ocean temperatures. What we will experience is earth will soon cool and the climate will change and the intensity of hurricanes will decrees.
Mankind will NEVER control the climate and it is foolish to imagine we will.