Weather Channel Co-Founder's Climate Denial Finds Warm Welcome At Fox News

Kelly File coleman

After being ignored by the mainstream media, the co-founder of The Weather Channel was given a platform on Fox News to spout climate denial. But the discredited former meteorologist has no formal education in climate science, and he did little in his Fox appearance but repeat falsehoods.

The October 28 edition of Fox News' The Kelly File featured John Coleman, co-founder of The Weather Channel, allowing him to promote his belief that “man-made global climate change is a myth.” During the segment, Coleman falsely claimed that the scientific consensus that human activities drive climate change is based on “bad, bad science” and repeated the falsehoods that an increase in Arctic ice disproves global warming and that polar bears are doing just fine. He also blamed Al Gore for making it difficult for a climate skeptic to “get on TV”:

Host Megyn Kelly joked that The Weather Channel is now going to “be pushed out of existence since [Coleman has] taken this position.” But Coleman's connections to The Weather Channel were severed decades ago; he helped created the 24-hour weather channel in the 1980s and served as CEO of the company until he was forced out one year after it went to air.

Moreover, Coleman's experience in weather forecasting does not make him an expert in climate science -- there is an immense difference between a scientist and a weather forecaster. For starters, they use different models and ask different questions: climate scientists observe and predict long-term trends over entire ecosystems, while meteorologists focus on weekly, daily, and hourly changes in the weather. MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel previously compared asking a meteorologist's opinion on the state of climate science to “asking a country doctor to comment on the latest developments in biomedical research.” Disregarding the fact that Coleman never received a formal education in meteorology -- his degree was in journalism -- his experience predicting the weather does not make him a credible source to debunk the vast majority of scientific literature on climate change.

Coleman also claimed that “9,000 Ph.D.'s and 31 [thousand] scientists” agree with his position on climate change, referring to the widely discredited Oregon Petition Project. Its signatories are mostly engineers with master's degrees, and it once included the names of fictitious characters and a member of the Spice Girls.

Coleman thanked Fox News for giving him a platform (in contrast to “the media” he berated), and in fact, Fox News has frequently turned to Coleman to deny the scientific consensus on global warming.

For years, Coleman has been connected to the Heartland Institute, which has been funded by fossil-fuel interests, and its promotion of climate change denial. Coleman was featured at a Heartland Institute climate conference in July of this year. Previously, he hosted four paid associates of Heartland to deny climate change on the San Diego station where he worked as weathercaster for 20 years (he has since retired). As Coleman told Kelly, the Heartland Institute has been promoting his letter urging UCLA's Hammer Museum to “provide balance” to a debate it recently hosted on climate change. In the letter, Coleman wrote, “It is important to have those who attend know that there is no climate crisis.”

On the same day the Kelly and Fox News chose to feature Coleman, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) convened to finalize a report saying that climate change driven by human activities will cause “severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts” if left unchecked, which Bloomberg News noted is "stronger language" than the panel has previously used. At the time of this posting, Fox News has not covered these IPCC meetings.*

*Based on a search of internal video archives for “climate.”

UPDATE (10/30/14): On October 29, The Weather Channel published an official "position statement" on global warming to their website, agreeing with the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are responsible for “the majority of the warming over the past century”: 

The climate of the earth is indeed warming, with an increase of approximately 1 - 1 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, more than half of that occurring since the 1970s.

[...]

[I]t is known that burning of fossil fuels injects additional carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This in turn increases the naturally occurring “greenhouse effect,” a process in which our atmosphere keeps the earth's surface much warmer than it would otherwise be.

More than a century's worth of detailed climate observations shows a sharp increase in both carbon dioxide and temperature. These observations, together with computer model simulations and historical climate reconstructions from ice cores, ocean sediments and tree rings all provide strong evidence that the majority of the warming over the past century is a result of human activities. This is also the conclusion drawn, nearly unanimously, by climate scientists.