(In These Times) -- Like millions of Americans this winter, as I sat in front of the TV, freezing and wrapped in a blanket, I kept waiting for the network news shows to utter the two most obvious words raised by the weather patterns of the past several months: climate change. We heard, repeatedly, about yet another “arctic blast,” the “inescapable winter” and various efforts to describe the wayward ways of the “polar vortex”—“a cyclone that sits over the poles” with a “counterclockwise rotation,” one CBS meteorologist offered. But we waited in vain for reporters to interview scientists about how these dramatic weather extremes are related to—and, in fact, evince—what has been unfortunately labeled “global warming,” a term suggesting that only heat waves could be evidence of climate change. Instead, CBS News interviewed the general manager of the Edinburgh Golf Course in Minnesota about “how the course came through the winter.”
Rather than using the drought in California, the tropical weather at the Sochi Olympics or the unrelentingly frigid temperatures throughout much of the United States as pegs for serious coverage of the costs of climate change, The Weather Channel, mainlining Italian B-movies about Hercules from the 1950s, went into a naming frenzy, with each storm, however fearsome or tepid, getting a moniker like Kronos or Maximus or, my favorite, Seneca (the wise storm?), all proposed by Bozeman, Mont., high school kids. The channel started personifying storms in 2012, explaining later that this was “the best possible ways to communicate severe weather information on all distribution platforms.” But their anthropomorphizing of storms as toga-clad gods trivializes the rise of extreme weather and contributes to what has come to be called “weather porn”: the rabid flogging of the disaster aspects of storms at the expense of all else.
