Friday 8 January 2010

degree of expertise missing

No, no, no: all this snow doesn't change the scientific consensus on climate change.

In this clip the BBC's David Shukman explains why weather is what you get day by day and climate is what you get over a 30 year period. Not everyone understands this. Lots of TV weathermen, for instance, don't understand this.

An excellent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review shows that only 24% of weathermen (the article always refers to them as men) believe that humans are responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century. So three-quarters of TV weathermen think that the great majority of climate scientists are wrong.

Except that, climatology isn't their subject. Meteorology is their subject. And very few of them took that very far. Only 17% of weathermen have a graduate degree.

But that's only half the story: the people who don't know about climate science are the people taking a 'rejectionist' position and they are the people who appear on TV every day who the public have got to know, to like and - yes - to trust.

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