It’s 91 degrees in Charlotte, North Carolina, in mid-July as evening sets in, and you can watch the story on WJZY-TV, the local Fox TV station there with the moniker Queen City News. “Another week, another scorcher,” says Morgan Frances, a co-anchor of the station’s 5 o’clock broadcast. “Triple-digit temperatures are expected across the Southwest as heat shows no sign of easing.”
It sounds like almost any weather report on any news program, but it quickly takes a turn. Frances hands off to the show’s meteorologist, Elisa Raffa, who does a four-minute report introducing “a new tool to track how climate change is impacting our temperatures.”
“It’s called the Climate Shift Index,” says Raffa, standing in front of a weather graphic. “It’s a new tool that we have from Climate Central. If you’re unfamiliar with them, they’re a nonprofit, nonpartisan science group, and this tool helps us compare the new, warmer climate to the past climate before we had so many greenhouse gas emissions.”
“It’s a real resource for us because, in broadcasting, time is of the essence,” Raffa says. “Having that graphic ready, visually understandable, I can get that climate story on the air in a fraction of the time.”
Like many TV meteorologists, Raffa researches and puts together her own stories, but many of her maps and data come from Climate Central. On this particular day, the map she’s pointing to shows a belt of deep red from California across Texas to the Gulf Coast, but it’s not actually a map of this summer’s heatwave; instead, it shows the relationship between the heat and the concentration of greenhouse gases over the past 30 years, calculated by Climate Central. The darker the shade of red in a given area, the greater the likelihood that the weather there was attributable to the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide and other gases.
Courtesy of Climate Central
Climate Central is a team of scientists, engineers, data specialists and journalists working to spread the word about how the climate is changing and affecting life at a local level. The group has partnered with more than 1,000 TV meteorologists around the country, plus about 4,000 other reporters and editors—supplying them with maps, graphs and background information to help explain today’s weather and its relationship to global warming trends.
Climate Central, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, was formed as a philanthropic venture in 2008 (its funders have included Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Wendy and Eric Schmidt of Google). It tried at first to produce its own stories for news outlets; then it hit upon the idea of enlisting TV forecasters as conduits. Research shows that local weather personalities are generally well-liked in the communities where they are on the air, certainly more so than other public figures in distrustful times. They are sometimes the only scientific figures viewers see regularly. Climate Central shares its information with them for free, to use as they see fit. They often present it as part of their regular forecasts.
So, for instance, if you live in Georgia, how many days per year does the heat index top 90 degrees, and how has it changed since 1979? In the Northeast, how often is there flash flooding in the summer? In Missouri, how often do you get 3-inch snow days in winter, as compared to past decades?
Climate Central can supply the numbers. In 201 locations across the U.S., it reports, the number of 90-degree days per year has gone up by 10 days on average since 1979. People are feeling it. So far this year, the group says, its material has been included in more than 4,000 broadcast news stories.
“We developed these tools to help people be able to see what climate change looks like,” says Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer by training who is chief scientist at Climate Central. “There is a huge demand out there from people who want to understand.”
“The resources from Climate Central are sometimes the first step of the story,” says Raffa. She splits her work between daily weather forecasts and climate-related stories.
Ollie Millington/Getty
Climate Central says it bases its climate index on decades of local weather data from around the world, plus the results of 22 computer climate models, each run with and without historical greenhouse gas emissions factored in. The darkest areas of red and brown on Raffa’s map mean that the heat there is as much as five times more likely to have occurred than if industrial gases had never begun to warm the atmosphere.
But Pershing and his colleagues readily point out that on any given day, large swaths of their maps will be white, meaning that the weather there is just…weather, no more or less likely to occur today than if there were no greenhouse warming. It may actually be as warm as some of the places marked in yellow or red, but it’s not abnormal.
And there are gray patches, too, where the weather at the moment is bucking the trend—perhaps having some cool days that are different from the patterns of recent decades. Climate Central says it’s important to show that.
“We’re not an advocacy organization,” says Pershing. “We’re not up on Capitol Hill trying to lobby for one set of policies or another. We really are trying to be an honest broker for information.”
A few days later, Raffa, on the way back to Charlotte after shooting a story about climate-resilient farming, says she is heartened when she gets to cover inventive answers to climate risks offered by scientists and businesses in her area. And while the issue she covers is contentious, she gets remarkably little pushback from viewers—perhaps, she says, because she’s telling helpful stories through local eyes. Viewers sometimes email afterward to thank her for telling them something they didn’t know before.
“I love teaching climate science and climate innovation to the public,” says Raffa. “And then what I hope is that, with that knowledge, we can be better at solutions.”