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Explaining climate change: The new role of the TV weathercaster

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  1. alyaza
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    sounds very much like an "if you build it, they will come" situation where people probably wanted to know about climate change even then, but it never occurred to people in the media to talk about...

    In 2005, when Ryan Hanrahan took a position as a meteorologist with the NBC affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut, he was not focused on climate change.
    "It wasn't so much that I didn't believe it was happening, but rather, I saw my job as telling people what to wear tomorrow, the chance of thunderstorms and to track hurricanes." In fact, he says, he shied away from talking about it for the first five years at the station.
    But now, he's seeing a different trend: viewers posing more climate questions.
    "This summer, for instance, we had three tornadoes within the span of a few weeks, and I saw comments on social media asking, 'Why aren't you talking about the link with climate change?' "

    sounds very much like an "if you build it, they will come" situation where people probably wanted to know about climate change even then, but it never occurred to people in the media to talk about it before climate matters stepped in because they didn't see it as their job to necessarily connect it to climate change in the first place--but that then once they did, immediately it became an expected part of the discourse surrounding the weather in their areas.

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