Mostly, your average telly meteorologist has tended to be one of the most inoffensive and mild-mannered individuals you’ll see on your nightly screen. Beige slacks, floral dresses, demure smiles, they’re peddling mostly innocuous information to let you know whether you should take an umbrella to work tomorrow.
But these days, it’s tough being a weather presenter. Heatwaves, fires, storms, floods and cyclones: it’s the weather person’s job to deliver the worst news about climate change.
The job and the weather have taken a distinctly political turn. Many dedicated meteorologists now also believe part of their job involves explaining that the environmental changes wrought by humankind are the reason for stronger storms, drier droughts and the hottest day of the year, every year, from now on.
In fact, a 2020 study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that viewers were more likely to understand the connection between extreme weather and climate change if their favourite weather person told them about it.
But that more instructional sort of weather forecast doesn’t always go down well. In the past, they used to get scientific questions, weather presenters on Germany’s national broadcasters recently reported. Now they get abused.
“Why are you a puppet for climate hysteria?” they’ve been asked via social media or their company’s customer complaints line. “Not a meteorologist, an ideologue!” German weather watchers have ranted. “Just a woke commentator for hire.”
Germany’s weather forecasters are only the latest to go public about this sort of harassment. In June, Chris Gloninger, an American weatherman in Iowa, made international headlines when he quit after getting death threats. In September, British weathercaster Laura Tobin talked about being accused of spreading “weather propaganda”.
Over the past European summer, national weather agencies in Spain, Britain and France have been accused of exaggerating, politicising and even engineering extreme weather. The US Met Office was told it was using a darker shade of red on its weather maps just to be more dramatic. “We hadn’t; it was just really hot,” a spokesperson told CNN.
Over the past few months in Germany, this kind of abuse has been getting worse, local weather forecasters say.
There are a number of likely reasons. For one thing, weather presenters never used to talk about climate change. Now they do.
And even though it should be non-partisan, climate change is increasingly a political issue. “The fact that, in conservative circles, protecting the environment is often described as something left wing or for greens is one of the biggest hurdles,” Karsten Schwanke, a meteorologist at Germany’s ARD broadcaster, told local media. “It’s a huge problem because then we lose a large – the consciously conservative – part of society.”
Currently, the ultra-conservative, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is becoming worryingly popular here. It’s creeping onto regional councils and the latest polls indicate it would get about 21% of a national vote. Part of the eternally oppositional group’s ascendance is based on its hostility toward the government’s plans to change the way locals heat their houses and travel. “Climate change is a political campaign concept,” the AfD regularly insists, arguing that humanity’s impact on the environment is still unproven.
Disinformation experts suggest abusing meteorologists is also part of a broader social trend around the erosion of trust in institutions and the growth of conspiracy theories, something that started during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And then, of course, there’s another reason for the harassment, probably the most depressing one of all: there is simply a lot more extreme weather for those plucky meteorologists to talk about. Not everyone wants to hear about it.
