Weather Reports Are Missing the Story
by Amy Goodman

The floodwaters are rising, swamping cities, breaching levees. Tens of thousands are displaced. Many are dead. No, I am not talking about Hurricane Katrina, but about the Midwest United States. As the floodwaters head south along the Mississippi, devastating communities one after another, the media are overflowing with televised images of the destruction.

While the TV meteorologists document “extreme weather” with their increasingly sophisticated toolbox, from Doppler radar to 3-D animated maps, the two words rarely uttered are its cause: global warming. I asked former Energy Department official Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, about the disconnect:

“Part of the reason is that the people who write about global warming for most newspapers and TV are not the same people as those who tend to cover weather. In general, the media is covering this as all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet … you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions.”

EXCERPT see complete story at https://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/19/9755/