Like clockwork, an unusual weather event occurs and some shallow journalists immediately leap to speculating about global warming – even accusing humankind of causing the event. On Thursday night, looking at the tornadoes across the South, ABC’s Sam Champion ridiculously claimed “everybody is asking if climate change played a role here.” Brian Williams blamed humans: “What's going on here? Is this something we have done?”
On the NBC Nightly News, Williams prompted Greg Forbes of the Weather Channel:
Let's be candid here. When you and I go home, you see friends and family, you get e-mail from people you know. People ask the same question: What's going on here? Is this something we have done? What has happened to the climate because it seems so much of what we cover is relentless weather-related tragedy?
Forbes skirted around Williams’ silliness:
Yeah, it really has been a remarkable April, certainly a record April. It may be the most tornadic month of any month on record. It certainly, the atmosphere has been in a frenzy. The jet stream just keeps blasting across the country, and then the warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico just keeps feeding the instability and so we’ve had tornado after tornado...
Champion, on ABC’s World News, conceded there’s no substantiation to the speculation:
You know, all winter long, Diane, we've been talking about the fact that the leaky Arctic fence, that unusual cold polar air, the melting sea ice, the thing is, there's no coordinated effort to study what that looks like on climate change compared to severe weather, so we don't know the answer to that.
