Yesterday, visitors to weather.com were greeted with a banner making the simple (yet somehow still contentious claim) that “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE.” The Weather Channel has set out to prove this point with a new series of stories showing climate impacts in all 50 states. In a rather bold move for the household outlet and go-to for weather reporting, the homepage of the site prominently linked to a number of those pieces, with normal weather maps and content available below the climate stories.
Calling the feature “United States of Climate Change,” the Weather Channel will not debate climate science in the series, but will instead tell climate stories. For example, the first link was to a a five minute video looking at South Carolina’s Gullah and Geechee communities, African-American communities living on the state’s coastal barrier islands.
As the video explains, these communities have watched their land shrink as the ocean rises, and they are facing a potential six feet of sea level rise by 2100. With shorelines already noticeably altered, such a rise poses a major threat to their continued survival of their four hundred year old culture. Yet their concerns have been dismissed by officials, one woman interviewed explains, who pass residents off as just “emotional natives.”
Meanwhile, in the northern US, warming winters are causing a different sort of problem. Another story shows how Connecticut residents are dealing with a climate-boosted growth in mouse and tick populations, which carry the threat of Lyme disease. As winter shrinks and temperatures warm, tick populations are no longer checked every winter, causing the Lyme disease they carry to spread rapidly.
Moving off the East Coast, perhaps someone should let Scott Pruitt know that beef production is taking a hit in his native Oklahoma. Cows are susceptible to heat stress, and warm days in winter before they’ve shed their heavier coats can be especially dangerous. When it hit 99 degrees F on February 11th last year, the cattle took to a pond to cool off, and yet skeptical ranchers interviewed for the story were still unconvinced of climate change. The story relays that there’s a certain degree of recognition that things are changing, but the resistance to what the Koch and Exxon and others have successfully branded as the liberal issue of climate change remains.
Finally, the Weather Channel’s Montana-based feature looks at how heat and drought have hurt the barley crop, a mainstay of local economies and one of the key ingredients in beer. Barley can survive a hot day, provided nights cool down. But with hotter days and hotter nights, the more valuable and desirable “plump” barley is in shorter supply while the less desirable “thins” and “mids” make up a greater proportion of the harvest. This is bad news for beer drinkers.
“No Barley, No Beer,” reads a farmer’s bumper sticker in the video.
If the thought of an America with no burgers and no beer doesn’t worry even the staunchest denier, we don’t know what will.
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