Several meteorologists who can be seen and heard in the newscasts of major Canadian television channels acknowledge having changed their tone and approach in the face of climate change, the consequences of which are worsening and are increasingly being felt.
Posted yesterday at 11:02 p.m.
While weather forecasters can sometimes be seen as typically lighter-toned television personalities, many claim to take a more educational and serious approach to explaining in more detail why a particular region is experiencing a certain bout of difficult weather and how it might affect those living there.
Meteorologist Warren Dean of CTV News in Vancouver is among those who have changed their tone and approach to climate change. He remembers how helpless he felt as a deadly heat dome towered over British Columbia last summer.
This weather presenter says that with his colleagues, they tried to hammer home the message of the seriousness of the situation in front of this heat dome. Unfortunately, many people did not heed the warnings.
“We were really helpless watching the impacts and seeing so many people suffer,” shared the meteorologist with 16 years of experience. More than 600 people died in this intense heat wave.
“I think we’ve done a really good job as a community of weather forecasters in passing on the warnings and advising people on how to adapt, but we still got the, ‘Well, it’s not going to be so terrible.” I think that with what we have seen, yes, it can be terrible. »
Warren Dean says he wants to be more educational in his weather reports and draw even more “from the scientific aspect of the weather”. He wants to help people fully understand why climate change is a real crisis.
His CBC colleague, meteorologist Colette Kennedy, who has worked in the profession since 1995, also admits that she has changed her way of proceeding in the face of the acceleration and accumulation of extreme weather events.
“We are used to talking in a cheerful tone when we are just reporting weather forecasts in general, but the difference when the weather is violent is that it becomes very serious. It can put lives in danger and you have to take a different approach, ”she says.
“Then there’s that in-between, where you only report forecasts that aren’t necessarily extreme like a tornado or severe thunderstorms, but are severe for their long-term effect on our planet. Then you have to be comfortable reporting bad news,” she describes.
For the president of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Jim Abraham, the challenge for weather forecasters in the face of climate change is to properly prepare people “for something they have never experienced before”.
“What all meteorologists around the world have to learn to deal with is how to communicate the danger in a way that everyone can understand? “, he argues. According to him, it is a mission that is learned and carried out gradually.
Jim Abraham points out that television weather presenters have long limited their coverage to temperature, humidity, wind strength and precipitation. However, he believes that we must also focus on the “impacts of these elements in particular” and how people can act to reduce their effects.
“I don’t think the public recognizes the extent of the risk posed by heat, for example, he develops. I doubt many Canadians realize that the worst fatal weather event in Canadian history occurred last year in British Columbia with the heat dome. »
Colette Kennedy stresses the importance for the entire meteorological community to adapt the discourse as climate change continues to affect people’s lives.
This article was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta Fellowships and The Canadian Press for News.