<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/outlook-terrifying-tv-weather-presenters-on-the-hell-and-horror-of-the-climate-crisis>
"Tuesday 19 July 2022 is a day that will stay with Ben Rich for ever. “I got up
and immediately checked the weather observations to see what was going on,” he
remembers. “Then I went to work for my shift. The station was really hot, the
train was really hot, and I remember having this moment. I got a bit emotional
about it, to be honest. I thought: this is huge. And if it can happen once, why
can’t it happen again?”
That was the day last year when the temperature in the UK surpassed 40C (104F)
for the first time ever. Rich is a BBC weather presenter and meteorologist. “In
my training, which was only about 10 years ago, I was led to believe that 40C
in the UK was nigh on impossible, because there are all sorts of factors that
should stop that from happening, not least the fact that we are surrounded by
ocean. It should be too moist for temperatures to get that high.”
It didn’t come out of the blue – the computer models had been predicting it for
a couple of weeks – but still it didn’t seem possible. “We were looking at it,
going: no, this isn’t realistic, it’s not going to happen,” says Rich. Then, in
the office, he watched as the temperature continued to rise. “There were
stories of wildfires in east London and other places, the train network went
down, there were reports of runways melting at some airports. All this was
happening at the same time.”
As well as a meteorologist, Rich is a journalist: he worked on news before
turning to the job he dreamed of doing as a kid. Of course, he knew this was a
big story: he was getting interviewed on TV in Australia and the US – places
much more used to extreme weather events. He found himself experiencing a mix
of emotions. “The excitement of the story, how busy we were at work, but also
that sense of real doom.”
Knowing and understanding what’s going on is one thing, but a whole new level
of awareness comes from actually experiencing something. “I think the human
condition is that to really get your head around a problem you have to be able
to see it and feel it,” he says. “That was a real watershed moment, when the
climate crisis was clearly happening to us, there and then. It felt to me that
was a marker that something had fundamentally shifted in what the weather is
capable of – and in our climatology.”"
Via Doug Senko, who wrote "Interesting article. The climatologists on TV
weather have to cheerfully present the ongoing and unstoppable catastrophe to
the masses, day after day."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
