Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman does not believe in climate change. He believes in politics.
“Al Gore was the one who took some kind of antiquated science and turned it into a major government-funded industry, and he was a Democrat,” Coleman, a former ABC meteorologist, told Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson of Chicago’s "Morning Answer" radio show.
Proft is a principal of Local Government Information Services, which owns this publication.
John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel
| https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/john-coleman
“Every Democrat feels very strongly that global warming is going to destroy the climate of Earth, and it’s become a total political issue, not a scientific issue, and I say shame, shame on them,” Coleman said.
Coleman does acknowledge that when burned, fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but he doesn’t believe it’s doing much damage.
“It’s a little gas," he said. "It’s absolutely invisible. It doesn’t smell. You can’t feel it; you can’t see it. After all these years of using fossil fuels, it is less than one half of 1 percent of the atmosphere."
Coleman said the Earth is naturally warming, but politics, not science, has turned “a little warming trend” into a “giant crisis.”
“The crisis is phony as best I can tell, and I’ve studied and studied and studied,” Coleman said.
Coleman cites a survey by the American Meteorological Society in which he said shows less than half of TV meteorologists believe in global warming trends. He said those that do mostly want attention.
“They find it makes them important," he said. "If they can say, ‘The sky is falling; we got a crisis,’ people are going to listen to them. They’re going to get on the top of the newscast."
The survey Coleman referenced was published in its final form in late 2013 using data gathered between 2008 and 2012. The survey asked respondents about global warming that happened over the last 150 years. Several respondents said their answers would have been different if they were asked about global warming trends within the past 50 years, and the survey acknowledged that this factor played a role in how the question was answered.
The AMS has a statement on its website that contradicts Coleman: "Warming of the climate system now is unequivocal, according to many different kinds of evidence. Observations show increases in globally averaged air and ocean temperatures, as well as widespread melting of snow and ice and rising globally averaged sea level."
It also asserts that the warming has been caused by mankind.
"It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide," it reads.
Alerts Sign-up