Fresh out of the indoctrination camps we call "higher education," Samantha Tassillo comes out full of fire for the noble ideological ideal of Climate Supremacy. And she wants to kill weather reporting to advance her agenda. In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Tassillo demands, Listen, weather reporters, don’t say it’s hot if you won’t say why. Citing reports on heat waves this summer, she writes
From reading these news stories I wouldn’t have known that the sweltering weather and global warming were connected.
Of course, you wouldn’t have known, because they’re not. The sweltering weather is connected to known atmospheric conditions that have historically caused sweltering weather.
In combing through recent articles on nj.com, I did find one single letter to the editor that mentioned greenhouse gas emissions as the cause of the summer heat waves, back in June of this year. Thank you, Walter Korfmacher from Westfield. I appreciate you.
Well, the only problem is, Kormacner is wrong. True, a degree or two difference on a hot day may be attributable to the increase in CO2, which is likely at least partially responsible for the mild warming of the past 150 years or so. But they are not a cause of the heat waves. That amounts to the claim that this summer’s heat waves would not have happened if not for human greenhouse gas emissions. That’s absurd. It doesn’t even rise to the level of plausible speculation. It’s pure fantasy. What is a fact is that without air conditioning, these heat waves would be as unbearable as they have been throughout most of human history, a degree or two cooler notwithstanding.
Otherwise, in the eight articles published about the heat wave in recent days, not one of them mentioned climate change, global warming or greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course they wouldn’t.* They’re reporters, not climate theorists. Mentioning “climate change, global warming or greenhouse gas emissions” would be irrelevant to specific weather event reports.
If reporters aren’t going to mention that carbon emissions are causing the heat waves, then there’s no sense in mentioning the heat at all. [?] A denial of one is a denial of the other. [??] We might as well live as if wet-bulb temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit don’t exist. [???]
The idea that without carbon emissions heat waves wouldn’t happen may come as a surprise to the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who had to work through 1787s “unbearably hot and humid Philadelphia summer to hammer out the Constitution.” It may come as a surprise to the Europeans of 1757, which endured a heat wave more brutal than 2022. And back then, the Northern Hemisphere was smack in the middle of the climatically turbulent Little Ice Age. History is replete with myriad other examples like these. In fact, just in my informed experience, which spans 73 years, temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit are common summertime occurrences, often reaching well past 100° F here in Jersey (1966 comes to mind). Reading this guest column, I feel like we’re in Twilight Zone territory that this even has to be pointed out.
Heat waves a sudden, brandy new occurrence, thanks to carbon emissions, climate change, global warming, and greenhouse gas emissions?
This would be cartoonish, except that it’s passed off as journalism in NJ’s largest newspaper.
It’s apparent that the Star-Ledger doesn’t even bother with fact checking any more. If it did, it would have flagged the preposterous claim that “carbon emissions are causing the heat waves.” But then, what would you expect from a charter member of the world propaganda cartel, Covering Climate Now(CCN). CCN is a massively one-sided big media project that is underpinned by the assertion that “the climate emergency is here.” This media cartel is the last link of a climate “knowledge system” in which influential thought leaders communicate to the public the knowledge that starts with basic scientific climate research. But the media twists the conclusion into the false climate catastrophist, anti-fossil fuel, non-impact-on-nature standard to the general public, under cover of the generic, authoritative-sounding “science says.” **
The climate is changing in many places as the average temperature of the Earth gradually warms. And, yes, some weather extremes have probably become marginally more extreme due to the warming. And, yes, human activity is undoubtedly part of the cause. This is a valid subject to explore, and I have no problem with studying the possible correlations between weather extremes and climate change, human induced or natural. Unfortunately for climate change fire-breathers like Tassillo, current studies have not yet uncovered much in the way of evidence for increased weather extremes, as former Obama science advisor Steven E. Koonan documents in his informative book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. One interesting fact Koonan observes is that daily record highs are in fact holding steady, with a slight downward bias. This chart hardly confirms Tassillo’s absurd claim that this year’s heat waves are a sudden, unprecedented result of climate change:
But climate theorizing, educated guessing, and speculation are beside the point when reporting on specific weather events. Weather has causes related to long-understood—and sometimes still little understood—atmospheric conditions. Cold and warm fronts, upper- and lower-level pressure systems, jet streams, and El Niños/La Niñas are a few of the causes. Geography also often plays a big role in regularly occurring weather extremes. Climate change is not one of them. Climate is not real, like weather. It is an average of weather measurements in a particular area over a long period of time, usually decades.*** So climate change can only be measured in decades, not by heat waves or any other weather events. To say climate change causes weather is like saying my bowling average causes my individual game scores. It’s reversing cause-and-effect, and it’s preposterous.
Weather reporters should not be sucked into doing the political propaganda bidding of climate catastrophists, confusing readers with erroneous claims of climate change causes. They should stick to the actual facts, or lose all credibility. Knowing the actual causes of weather phenomena is vital to predicting weather and preparing warnings of impending dangerous weather extremes. Spouting off about climate change causing extreme weather would be useless to people who need real information about weather. Scaring us into being perpetually hunkering down as if weather disasters were just around every corner is not helpful. 99.9% of the time is spent in tranquil weather, or bad weather that we are protected from due to modern technology. And if severe weather threatens, simplistic climate change/eliminating fossil fuels “causes/solutions” will not teach us how to actually prepare for the dangers. Incessant Chicken Little sky-is-falling proclamations about heat waves won’t do us any good. Only facts and knowledge can do that. Weather forecasts of impending heat waves, and why, are useful. Climate hysteria is not.
Tassillo is dead wrong. Climate change has no place in weather reporting. Her claim that climate change caused this summer’s heat waves has no scientific or historical validity. (It is, in fact, a quasi-religious view.)
Silly as her premise is, Tassillo resorts to a truly cruel tactic which I can’t let pass—comparing the failure to “report” climate change as a cause of heat waves with the failure of some to fully account for slavery in antebellum America.
You might’ve even heard of Ellen Bresler Rockmore’s viral New York Times article from 2015 on “How Texas Teaches History”: in the passive voice. She scours Texan American History textbooks, only to find that the writers manipulated language to diminish slaveowners’ culpability for the treatment of slaves.
The authors penned sentences like “severe treatment was very common” and “[w]hippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of American slavery.” These statements position the act of slavery as something inherent to the age, not something that individuals were responsible for — something that they could have changed.
Whether Tassillo is correct about Texas history books is beside the point. The cruel point is to place weather reporters who exclude mention of climate change on the moral level of the writers who allegedly manipulated language to diminish slaveowners’ culpability for the treatment of slaves! It’s hard to overstate how morally abominable this is. Shame on Samantha Tassillo, and shame on the Star-Ledger for publishing this trash.
Neglecting to mention climate change in articles about heat waves paints a passive picture of the world in a very similar way. These articles implicitly reimagine extreme weather as something that happens independently of us, which we know not to be true. Perhaps these writers have omitted it to avoid being “political,” but news about climate change doesn’t belong in the op-ed section.
Unfortunately, much of it does. Extreme weather is something that has always happened independently of us. But Tassillo is not interested in facts, and she doesn’t want reporters to be, either. She obviously hasn’t yet escaped the iron grip of climate indoctrination, and may never. But she should really start thinking for herself. And she desperately needs to check her moral premises. Equating honest weather reporters with slaveowners is cold bloodedly unjust to weather reporters, not to mention insulting to the slaves who were forced to labor in the fields during summer heat waves. (Yes, Samantha, there were heat waves during the plantation slave era.)
If Tassillo gets her way, then all weather reporting would belong on the op-ed pages—meaning, weather journalism would effectively end. That would be a shame for anyone seeking genuine news coverage of weather events, especially for a life-long weather buff like myself. Climate speculations have no place in a news article reporting on this summer’s heat waves or on any other weather events. The fact is, though, that some mention of climate change or some variation of “scientists say” or “experts say” in weather reporting is already way too common. Weather “reporting” is already moving away from real journalism. It’s not too bad, yet. Let’s not completely destroy it. People need real facts. Weather reporting and articles covering the speculative relationship of weather to the broader, long-term phenomenon of climate change are not the same thing.
* [If true. I’ve seen plenty of articles on the heat wave that do mention climate change.]
** [A knowledge system is a multi-step process. It is the way basic expert research is communicated to the general public in consolidated, easily understood form. In terms of climate, it is devastatingly indoctrinating, denying the public the proper consolidation of the objective facts about climate, energy, economics, and liberty as they relate to climate. Alex Epstein explains this distorted “knowledge system” in his book Fossil Future.]
*** [The National Centers for Environmental Information, a division of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, calculates U.S. climate normals over 30 year periods. The World Meteorological Organization and National Weather Service rely on this data. The 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals are the latest in a series of decadal normals first produced in the 1950s.]
Related Reading;
The Associated Press’s Biased ‘Reporting’
The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign
False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey
Related Viewing:
“Expert knowledge is crucial to life, so the solution to a bad system for expert knowledge is not throwing out expert knowledge.” -- Alex Epstein
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