NYT: 56% Trust Weathercasters More Than Gore On Global Warming

"A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore."

So wrote the New York Times's Leslie Kaufman in a rather surprising piece published Tuesday.

Shhh. Wait. It got better -- A LOT better:

A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.” 

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The Times even quoted and/or referred to some of the more prominent weathercasting skeptics:

Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site. [...]

Several well-known forecasters — including John Coleman in San Diego and Anthony Watts, a retired Chico, Calif., weatherman who now has a popular blog — have been vociferous in their critiques of global warming. 

Kaufman even referred to recent events that have put a cloud on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making theory:

The dissent has been heightened by recent challenges to climate science, including the discovery of errors in the 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from a British climate research center last fall that skeptics say show that climate scientists had tried to suppress data. 

And even mocked the Global Warmingest-in-Chief:

A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate. 

Wow. Imagine the New York Times reporting that Americans trust ANYONE more than Al Gore when it comes to his favorite money-making theory.

I guess the editors felt they were covered by including Palin in that sentence.