We were amused by this one. In the 1 pm hour, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers was talking about the frigid temperatures in the eastern United States. Guess the culprit? As always, global warming.
"So what's causing all of this cold air? If I tell you and I look at you straight in the face and tell you global warming, you're going to laugh at me. But in fact, it's the case." At least he didn't applaud Obama's inaugural comments about climate-change policy:
Want evidence that working at CNN can wear you down? Although this isn't definitive, something has happened to network meteorologist Chad Myers.
Back on Dec. 18, 2008, Myers explained to viewers of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" that he thought the entire notion that mankind could affect the weather was "pretty arrogant."
"You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant," Myers said. "Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big - I think we're going to die from a lack of fresh water or we're going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure."
But fast forward a year and a half and you'll see how things change. On the Aug. 9 daytime broadcast of CNN's "Rick's List," that same Myers has a little bit different view. Myers was asked by the show's host Rick Sanchez the so-called "$60,000 question," but not without a preemptive cheap shot at climate skeptics on the right.
[Update, 10:25 am Eastern Friday: Rick Sanchez dismissed his Iceland remark as a "joke" on Twitter on Friday morning: "yeah, it's friday reading up on...dummies who took my joke w chad about vocano [sic] literally. duhh!" Minutes later, he labeled those pointing out the comment "haters."]
On Thursday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez again demonstrated his lack of knowledge of basic science, again related to geology. As he covered the volcanic eruption in Iceland which has disrupted thousands of airplane flights across Europe, he commented that "when you think of a volcano, you think of Hawaii and long words like that. You don't think of Iceland. You think it's too cold to have a volcano there" [audio available here; alternate video link here].
The anchor, who asked on-air, "By the way, nine meters in English is?" after the massive earthquake in Chile on February 27, directed his "too cold" remark to CNN on-air meteorologist Chad Myers, who also reports on other science-related stories. Myers didn't get into details of plate tectonics as footage of the volcano played on-screen, but explained that "a plume of ash [was] coming out of the top of [a] volcano, going straight up."
Sanchez then asked about one of the details in the video: "What's that white stuff though? It looks like clouds." The meteorologist replied, "That's just a cloud....The volcano is going off, but there's just regular weather happening underneath it. This thing is going tens of thousands of feet in the sky, and it is going right into the flight path of an awful lot of airplanes."