Some TV meteorologists want to talk about climate change. Not everyone wants to hear it

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John Morales remembers the moment he broke down on air.

The veteran meteorologist, who works for the WTVJ television station in Miami, had been talking about climate change in his weather reports for decades. But in October 2024, after watching Hurricane Milton rapidly gain strength off the coasts of Florida and Mexico, he began tearing up.

"I was delivering the facts, but suddenly I realized how strong of a hurricane that could be, how many victims it could take, how many lives it could ruin," he told What on Earth? host Johanna Wagstaffe at the Climate Week NYC conference.

"These events are happening with such frequency now, and there’s so many people in harm’s way, that I feel more compelled to call for action, to have people prepare for the worst, because the worst is happening, more and more often."

Hurricane Milton would go on to kill 15 people across the U.S. and Mexico, according to a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report. NOAA estimated Milton caused a further 27 indirect deaths related to preparation, clean-up and power failures, not to mention $34.3 billion US in damages in Florida.

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Morales said his reaction was a mix of climate anxiety, anticipatory grief for the victims and frustration.

"For 20 or 25 years, I’ve been communicating on climate, providing climate context to audiences, empowering them through education, to demand action on climate," he said.

"Yet hardly anything has been done."

It wasn’t always like this. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Morales was excited by the storms he now often dreads. The fascination led him to a career as a meteorologist. 

At a meeting of meteorologists at the White House in 1997, vice-president Al Gore said something that inspired Morales. Gore asked why meteorologists comment on events like shooting stars, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions but not climate change. Morales said it was the catalyst for talking about climate change on air.

"At first it was difficult, and then I started to see more opportunities and less resistance from managers in newsrooms for me to do that," he said.

"My hand was getting slapped less and less."

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Today, Morales says, he rarely gets pushback from audiences, and Miamians often thank him for his climate coverage.

And he’s got a lot of company now, as just one of many meteorologists who incorporate climate change into their work in front of the green screen. Morales lauds the work of his peer Elisa Raffa, who takes this approach in more conservative cities across the Midwest, explaining the phenomenon in a way that resonates with those audiences.

But for some broadcast meteorologists, it can be a dangerous undertaking.

The cost of communicating climate

In 2019, Chris Gloninger was working as a meteorologist for NBC’s WBTS television station in Boston, one of the biggest markets in the country, when he successfully pitched the station on a weekly climate change segment.

In 2021, he decided he needed to talk about climate change in a more skeptical, conservative market. He took a job with KCCI in Des Moines, Iowa.

"I saw there was an opportunity to talk climate in a part of the country where it wasn’t being talked about," he told Joanna Wagstaffe at Climate Week NYC. 

"That was a difficult decision, and honestly it was leaving a dream job, but I was up for the challenge, because I thought it was that important of an issue."

Chris Gloninger previously reported for NBC Boston, but left that job for an opportunity in Des Moines, Iowa. (Submitted by Chris Gloninger)

It meant trading his dedicated climate change segment for 10- to 15-second tidbits on climate trends and renewable energy during weathercasts. Still, Gloninger knew that global warming had powerful implications for Iowa’s large agricultural sector, and he was undeterred by the hate mail. He took the approach of talking about the financial costs of climate change and energy independence to get through to Iowans.

"I had to make sure that I was not an activist. I had to make sure that I was not trying to be an educator," he said.

"I just simply wanted to be the local meteorologist that was showing trends, and explaining ... why things were happening the way they were happening."

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But everything changed with one email. In 2022, a viewer sent Gloninger a death threat referencing the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh just weeks earlier. A man with a gun, a knife and zip ties had been arrested outside Kavanagh’s home.

In August 2022, police in Iowa charged Danny Hancock, 63, who pleaded guilty to third-degree harassment and received a fine, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.

After that, Gloninger said he felt a lack of support from the station. He says KCCI began pushing him to stop talking about climate change and science. He left in 2023.

"They did a 180 on what they agreed with when they hired me," he said. "No viewer email stung as much as the response that I received from them."

KCCI and its parent company, Hearst Television, have not responded to CBC’s request for comment.

Chris Gloninger stands outside his home in West Des Moines, Iowa, on June 27, 2023. The meteorologist left his job at KCCI in Iowa partly because of threats he received for his climate change coverage on air. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)

Gloninger now works for an environmental engineering company in Cape Cod, Mass. He enjoys his work, but the transition has been hard.

"It felt like I was giving up on the dream that second-grade Chris had," he said of his last day as a broadcast meteorologist. "I miss it. I really do."

Are things different in Canada?

Chris Scott, chief meteorologist at Pelmorex — The Weather Network’s parent company — said he doesn’t think climate change is a controversial topic in Canada. But he also believes viewers aren’t really tuning in for it.

"When people come to The Weather Network on a daily basis, they are looking for information to help them make decisions, like how to dress, 'what is my drive going to be like? When can I do an outdoor activity?'" he said.

Scott said the network’s approach is to incorporate climate change to reporting on extreme weather events, such as the wildfires that ravaged parts of the country this summer.

Jason Thistlethwaite, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, was co-author on a 2019 study that interviewed Canadian weather broadcasters, including the CBC, on their role in communicating climate change. The broadcasters reported a range of barriers, from fears of poor audience and station management reception to a lack of time and newsroom resources to do segments.

"I wouldn’t go so far as to say that for every six o’clock news broadcast, that a meteorologist needs to be spending a few seconds saying, 'Well, today is quite clearly being influenced by global climate change,'" Thistlethwaite said in an interview.

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"Where I think there is opportunity is sort of to give them opportunities to do their own stories."

For Gloninger, climate change is an essential part of the job.

"As meteorologists, we get into this to save and protect life and property," he said. "If you’re not doing that, you’re failing your audience."