Knowing Coleman, I’m sure he would have been delighted by this response from people whose good opinion he valued so little.
What he would have especially relished, I suspect, is the arrogance and pomposity and self-delusion of Peter Gleick’s claim to be on the #Science side of the argument.
That same arrogance, pomposity and self-delusion is evident in this similarly gloating obituary of Coleman in New Republic by one Emily Atkin.
Read the rest on Breitbart; there’s a good sting in the tail!
John Coleman, the cheerful, politically incorrect and fearless co-founder of the Weather Channel, has died at 83, surrounded by family at his Las Vegas home.
The bad news is that he lived long enough to see his creation turn into yet another propaganda arm of the Climate Industrial Complex churning out #fakenews stories like this one.
Guess they are correct. I will die. So will the others. Then things will be settled.
Got it.
Coleman had a career of two distinguished halves.
In this July 30, 1981 photo, John Coleman, weather channel founder, right, and Frank Batten, publisher of the Norfolk, Va., Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, and chairman and chief executive of Landmark Communications, Inc., are seen during a news conference in New York. (AP/Marty Lederhandler)
He made gigantic contributions to television, to weather forecasting, and even to the National Weather Service who changed and upgraded many of their methods to accommodate the visionary ideas he had in founding the Weather Channel.
In 1983, Coleman won the American Meteorological Society award for Outstanding Service by a Broadcast Meteorologist. The organization credited Coleman for “his pioneering efforts in establishing a national cable weather channel,” according to the AMS website.
Wow! Breitbart’s climate science has come under attack from a devastating new rhetorical technique: theargumentum ad puellam pulchram. (aka the Argument from a Pretty Girl)
Well, it certainly makes a nice change from the usual tired old tricks deployed by the alarmist establishment — the ad hominem, the Appeal to Authority, etc. And it seems to have been quite effective, too: for a while yesterday, Weather Girl Kait’s attack was the number one item on Reddit, and I’ve received several tweets from impressionable SJW types brimming with righteous indignation at my climate-denying ignorance. Also, I know that several other organisations — including AOL — are keen to join Parker in sticking the boot in. This I find very flattering, because when the liberal media joins forces to try to humiliate you, it means they consider you a very powerful threat.
But I do wish Kait hadn’t got involved, for I fear I’m going to have to be very ungallant by revealing her entire argument to be fatally flawed.
First, a basic point of information. Parker expresses outrage that an irrelevant video about La Niña “with my face in it” was taken from the Weather Channel and used by Breitbart to illustrate an article I wrote called Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence From the Climate Alarmists.
Here’s our Editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow, putting that detail right: “This is not a Breitbart video. It’s provided by and placed by a third party video vendor. The Weather Channel should chill out.” More precisely, none of Breitbart’s editors made the choice or performed the action of sticking the Weather Channel’s video on the article.
And yes, indeed, the Weather Channel should chill. And, better still, stick to its day job and actually report on the weather rather than engaging in agenda-driven politics. This is an argument the Weather Channel is not going to win, and whoever put poor Kait Parker up to this ridiculous, embarrassing stunt should be ashamed of themselves. It is going to backfire horribly, as I’m about to demonstrate.
Before we move onto the threadbare science in Parker’s arguments, let’s just first marvel at the way she has tried to blame Breitbart for something it did not do.
Though we would prefer to focus on our usual coverage of weather and climate science, in this case we felt it important to add our two cents — especially because a video clip from weather.com (La Niña in Pacific Affects Weather in New England) was prominently featured at the top of the Breitbart article. Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company, but there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it.
And her point is what, exactly? As she herself admits here, “Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company.” So she understands the deal: it wasn’t Breitbart’s conscious decision to use that particular video. Rather, the video was put up there by a third party with a view to promoting the work of the Weather Channel by bringing it in front of a wider audience.
If the Weather Channel doesn’t want access to Breitbart’s 45 million global readership, then that is the Weather Channel’s loss, not Breitbart’s. Perhaps it fancies being the meteorological equivalent of Kellogg’s. Well, good luck with that.
Even more bizarre is Parker’s accusation that her clip is being used by Breitbart to “mislead Americans.” How exactly? The clip, as it happens, shows Parker talking about how the cyclical Pacific Ocean event known as La Niña is going to result in a colder-than-usual weather in the US — “in the North East you might get more of that cold air all the way through spring.”
So she’s actually agreeing with what Breitbart said in the article: that La Niña effect has been causing temperatures to drop dramatically. Apparently, in Parker’s view, it’s OK when meteorologists who believe in “global warming” say this stuff. But it’s not OK when a sceptical website like Breitbart says it.
