Meteorologist leaves TV journalism after climate harassment
DES MOINES — The harassment started to intensify as TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger did more reporting on climate change during local newscasts — outraged e-mails and even a threat to show up at his house.
Gloninger, who appeared on NBC Boston from 2016 to 2021, said in a 2021 report for the Boston station, “Certainly there is trolling, certainly there is negative feedback. But the amount of it has gone down, and I think people are a lot more willing to have a conversation.”
But now, in Iowa, backlash was building. The man who sent him a series of threatening emails was charged with thirddegree harassment. The Des Moines station asked him to dial back his coverage, facing what he called an understandable pressure to maintain ratings.
“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.
So, on June 21, the 38year-old announced that he was leaving KCCI-TV — and his 18-year career in broadcast journalism altogether.
Gloninger’s experience is all too common among meteorologists across the country who are encountering reactions from viewers as they tie climate change to extreme temperatures, blizzards, tornadoes, and floods in their local weather reports. For on-air meteorologists, the anti-science trend that has emerged in recent years compounds a deepening skepticism of the news media.
Many meteorologists say it’s a reflection of a more hostile political landscape that has also affected workers in a variety of jobs previously seen as nonpartisan, including librarians, school board officials, and election workers.
For several years, Gloninger said, “beliefs are amplified more than truth and evidence-based science. And that is not a good situation to be in as a nation.”
Gloninger’s announcement sent reverberations through a national conference of broadcast meteorologists in Phoenix, where many shared their own horror stories, recalled Brad Colman, president of the American Meteorological Society.
“They say, ‘You should have seen this note.’ And they try to take it with a smile, a lighthearted laugh,” Colman said. “But some of them are really scary.”
Meteorologists have long been subjected to abuse, but that has intensified in recent years, said Sean Sublette, a former TV meteorologist and now the chief meteorologist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“More than once, I’ve had people call me names or tell me I’m stupid or these kinds of harassing type things simply for sharing information that they didn’t want to hear,” he said.
A decade ago, far fewer TV meteorologists were talking about climate change on air, although they wanted to do so, said Edward Maibach, the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
The Weather Channel gave its first climate reporter, scientist Heidi Cullen, a dedicated show in 2006. She faced bitter and sexist resistance from some viewers, including conservative leaders, as she challenged other TV forecasters to address global warming in their reporting.
Climate Matters, a National Science Foundation-funded project, piloted in 2010 and fully launched in 2012 to support reporting on climate change by providing data analysis, graphics, and other reporting materials.
Now TV meteorologists across the country report on climate change, though Maibach said they don’t always use those words. It is increasingly common to at least show its effects, he said, like highlighting the trend of more days in a year hitting temperatures above 90 degrees.
Even if that kind of reporting resonates with most people, the criticism can be the loudest.
“If you stop reporting on relevant and important facts about what’s going on in your community because you’re hearing from the one out of 10, it means you are not serving the other nine out of 10,” Maibach said.
Gloninger is moving back to Boston to care for aging parents, but he says he’s leaving Des Moines having realized that a small percentage of people who reject climate change make up an overwhelming percentage of the negative comments he has gotten. The Des Moines Register reported that Gloninger plans to join the Woods Hole Group as a senior scientist in climate and risk communication.