Pirate's Cove

Well, if the cultists, in this case the UK Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries who writes the cult screed, don’t like it they can start their own news station, right?

‘You don’t want to waste time on climate change’: TV weather’s big problem with the environmental crisis
Lack of time, difficulties with scientific rigour, an uninterested public … television meteorologists open up about why they’re so quiet about the reasons for extreme conditions

Why do TV and radio forecasts rarely contextualise extreme weather events in terms of the climate crisis? After all, the latest data suggests Britain is getting hotter, wetter and stormier. The number of “very hot days” of 30C or more, according to the Met Office’s latest climate report, has trebled over the last few decades. Last year was the second warmest on record since 1884, with only 2022 warmer.

“If you believe, as I do, that climate change is the most fundamental challenge facing humanity,” says Sunil Amrith, history professor at Yale’s School of Environment, and author of the forthcoming book The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Past 500 Years, “any contribution to making its causes and effects more widely known will have a role to play”.

Sunil could go into business with Stuart. Why don’t they do a webcast with their climate cult weather forecast? See how that goes

Met Office forecaster and presenter Alex Burkill does not agree that climate denialism is rife among meteorologists. “I think the reason we don’t do it very often is twofold. One is timings. We don’t always have a huge amount of time to talk, particularly on TV. If there’s important weather to be discussing, you don’t really want to waste time talking about climate change. You’d much rather get the information the public need to make sure they stay safe.”

This goes to the subheadline: people do not care, they just want their damned weather forecast, not a lecture on climate doom. Will it rain? Snow? Sleet? Be hot, cold, or a gorgeous day you can take a significant other, the kids, your parents, out for a nice lunch or something? It’s like how no one wants to hear about gun grabbing in the middle of a football game.

But your nightly weather bulletin is poised to be revolutionised, like everything else in human culture, by artificial intelligence. Charlton-Perez points out that in the past two years Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Huawei have been developing weather forecasts using AI technology. “They run thousands of times faster than normal weather forecasting models. I can run those on my laptop.”

Perhaps AI could not only more accurately forecast the weather but ChatGPT-engaged bots could present it, making, say, Carol Kirkwood and Stav Danaos redundant. “From a presenter point of view, there’s obviously the concern that we might get replaced with an AI robot,” says Burkill. “I don’t think that’s going to happen particularly soon, because I think people still want that human interaction.” He has a more pressing worry – that his weather forecasts can be deepfaked. “More concerning is the ability for people to use AI to modify what we’ve said. They can be quite convincing.”

And the climate cult could get the AI to present climate doom with a side of the weather forecast. I’ve been watching this issue for so long and seen it become so hardcore over the years and decades that I was really one of the first to call it a cult, hence I read this as a threat to weathermen that they had better comply with the cult or they will be replaced.