As smoke from Canadian wildfires choked the skies of upstate New York this summer, Steve LaPointe, CBS6 chief meteorologist in Albany, helped viewers understand the link between climate change and the unusually hot, dry conditions fueling the fires, thanks, in part, to a grant from the Bezos Earth Fund.
LaPointe showed viewers a graphic of the parts of Canada where wildfires were burning out of control, creating the smoke that blanketed the Northeast. Then he cut to something called the Climate Shift Index, which calculates how much climate change is contributing to a particular weather event. The index showed that the unusually high temperatures in the wildfire zones were three to five times more likely because of climate change.
“I was able to use the Climate Shift Index to really drive that point home in a segment within my weathercast,” he says. “There’s a climate change connection in our smoky skies.”
The Climate Shift Index uses sophisticated algorithms to determine how much local weather around the world is being altered by climate change. It uses the same models that allow scientists to attribute the role of climate change to a particular weather event like a hurricane. It once took months to understand the impact of human-caused climate change on extreme weather, but now scientists can determine that on a daily basis, and even apply it to immediate forecasts.
The index is a cooperative effort of several organizations, including Climate Central, World Weather Attribution, and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and it’s supported in part by a $10 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. The groups are using the money to advance the science, increase the number of extreme weather events that World Weather Attribution can study around the world, and help push the index out to meteorologists in the United States as well as Britain and India.
Climate groups are starting to realize that they need to do a better job communicating the link between climate change and local conditions, says Kelly Levin, chief of science, data, and systems change at the Bezos Earth Fund.
“There is an increasing understanding that many people are most influenced by what they see on a daily basis,” she says. “Often they’re listening to their local TV channel or their local meteorologist.”
‘Part of the Community’
The fast, sharp reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions necessary to stave off the worst effects of climate change will require vast change, says Benjamin Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. “That shift in the societal priority and focus can only happen if people understand in a deep way what the stakes are and how it affects them personally,” he says. The Climate Shift Index is one tool the group is using to boost a broader understanding of climate change.
The coalition and the Earth Fund are betting that local TV news is one of the best ways to inform people about potentially divisive issues like climate change.
Weather forecasters have an almost personal relationship with viewers — they are a trusted source of information, says Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. He has coauthored studies examining what viewers learn from climate information in local weather forecasts.
Often the public views climate change as a global problem affecting polar bears and future sea-level rise. It’s too abstract for many people to understand its dire impacts, Maibach says. But local meteorologists can make climate change more concrete by helping people see the effects where they live. “Local TV weathercasters can be a powerful source of education about the personal and local relevance of climate change,” says Maibach, who also partnered with Climate Central on a project called Climate Matters, which distributes material to weathercasters about climate change.
In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 70 percent of respondents said that weather is important for their daily life — more than any other subject covered by local news.
What’s more, local news is viewed very differently by the public than national and cable news, says Katerina Eva Matsa, director of news and information research at the Pew Research Center. People see national and cable news through a partisan lens — Fox News versus MSNBC, for example, she says. But local news is seen as nonpartisan.
“People experienced their local journalism as part of the community,” she says. “They were more likely to rate their media and the journalists highly.”
LaPointe, the meteorologist in Albany, says he does receive complaints, but they tend to be from the same handful of people. Maibach surveyed weathercasters from 2010 to 2020 and says that they reported getting mostly positive and only some negative feedback when they talked about climate change.
However, for at least one meteorologist, viewer animosity became too much. In June, Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist at a Des Moines news station, announced his resignation after receiving sustained threats from a viewer over his climate coverage.
Extreme Weather
World Weather Attribution — the group behind the scientific models the index uses to determine the role of climate change in daily weather — is also responsible for shifting how the media talks about extreme weather events and how the public understands them, says Strauss at Climate Central. Less than a decade ago, media reports about big hurricanes or heat waves would always say scientists couldn’t attribute any single weather event to climate change.
“World Weather Attribution changed that,” he says. “If you look at the headlines in the last couple of years in the news, it’s really been a complete transformation in how leading media organizations cover extreme weather and climate.”
The grant is helping World Weather Attribution do more of its own studies that use the models behind the Climate Shift Index but are more complex. The group examines major extreme weather events around the world. It considers multiple factors — including related weather patterns and how these events play out over time — and determines the climate link. It also examines how communities fared and how well things like early-warning systems worked.
Last year the group did 12 of these studies. With the grant funding, it plans to do 20 this year, says co-founder Friederike (Fredi) Otto, who is also a senior lecturer at Imperial College in London.
The Earth Fund hopes its support will help the organization both expand the number of studies it does and better communicate the results to the public.
“Every time an extreme weather event happens, Fredi will tell you that the amount of calls she gets, she just can’t respond to,” says the Earth Fund’s Levin. “Growing this community so that they have more capacity to be able to respond and get the terrific science that they’re generating out into the public, that’s something that we really care deeply about.”
Complicated to Understand
The Climate Shift Index is delivered to meteorologists in a format that’s very easy to use, LaPointe says. He can layer it over his existing graphics, and it fits the needs of his forecast.
“It’s very immediate. They’re running the programs continuously,” he says. “We can look at yesterday’s temperatures. We can look at today’s high and low temperature. We can look at tomorrow’s. We can look at the day after tomorrow.”
Yet it’s not clear how well viewers understand what the index means. To say that climate change made a heat wave five times more likely can be complicated to understand. LaPointe wrote a blog post about it that he points viewers to, and he always links to Climate Central when he posts on social media about the index.
“When you’re on television, you’ve got 30 to maybe 40 seconds max to make an explanation. You say, ‘Here’s this new sophisticated attribution tool which allows us to get a read on the impact of climate change on the morning low temperature we had here in the capital region today,’ and then you move on,” he says. “Anything mathematical like that is a challenging thing to try to get across to people.”
Part of the grant will help the nonprofits push the index out across the United States and also to India and Britain — places with very different media markets and different levels awareness of climate change.
Here in the United States, climate change still gets scant coverage. According to Media Matters, only 5 percent of national segments and weathercasts about the heat dome that settled on the Southwest in June mentioned climate change. The study noted that CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam did use the Climate Shift Index to inform his viewers that climate change made the excessive heat five times more likely. But he was the exception.
“It’s a tiny fraction of the news coverage of extreme weather that mentions climate change at all,” says Strauss, at Climate Central. “There’s a lot of work that remains to be done.”
