My final presenter, Kait Parker, a meteorologist and climate reporter for IBM’s The Weather Channel – talking to me on a video call from Atlanta, Georgia – agrees that the job of communication has become more important. It’s now more than sticking cut-out suns and clouds on maps with a smile it’s about communicating and explaining things that are important. They can put a number on it – say, for example, it’s 100 times more likely this event has occurred because of climate change.”Īnd that is something that has changed about the job of weather presenter. They then go back and put in a lot of different scenarios so they can calculate the likelihood of this event happening because of climate change. She explains how scientists have learned to detect a climate-change footprint in a particular weather event (extreme heat, rain, storms, etc) “by running the computer models with the scenario that has just happened but with lower amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to see if you could actually squeeze out that temperature, or that amount of rainfall. We are able to communicate now what we have been seeing and feeling and understanding for a lot longer.” When I did my first bulletin that morning, I forecast that we would break 40C. “The onset of something called attribution studies has made our messaging easier and clearer. But, as Clare Nasir puts it: “Climate impacts weather.” Nasir – who presents on Channel 5 as well as working at the Met Office (though views she expresses here are hers, not its) – says it has become easier to get this across in the past five or six years. Of course, weather is not the same thing as the climate: one happens over days, the other decades. I’m talking to four weather presenters and meteorologists about what it is like to have a front row seat at the worst show in the world: the climate crisis. We shouldn’t be reaching these temperatures – it would be impossible to without climate change.” Something I had thought would be a reality in the future was a reality that day. Then when I sat down and chatted to my producer, I had tears in my eyes. “I remember when I did my first bulletin on that Tuesday morning I forecast that we would break 40C. Like Rich, she had been watching the models with a mixture of incredulity and dread. Switching channels, the ITV meteorologist Laura Tobin, who does the weather bulletins on Good Morning Britain, was also on duty that day. It felt to me that was a marker that something had fundamentally shifted in what the weather is capable of – and in our climatology.” “That was a real watershed moment, when the climate crisis was clearly happening to us, there and then. “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. Knowing and understanding what’s going on is one thing, but a whole new level of awareness comes from actually experiencing something. “The excitement of the story, how busy we were at work, but also that sense of real doom.” He found himself experiencing a mix of emotions.
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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. All this was happening at the same time.”Īs well as a meteorologist, Rich is a journalist: he worked on news before turning to the job he dreamed of doing as a kid. “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. Then, in the office, he watched as the temperature continued to rise. “We were looking at it, going: no, this isn’t realistic, it’s not going to happen,” says Rich.
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.
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