ABC continued its global warming hype with, quite appropriately, the weather man. Wednesday’s Good Morning America started its weather forecast with, as he put it, "big, big, big news" that 2006 was the warmest year in 112 years of recording weather. Weatherman Sam Champion asserted the politically correct belief of global warming and then sought to clarify the distinction between individual weather patterns and long term trends. But check out the map: America is apparently on fire, and with an average temperature of 55 degrees.
Then in an unintentionally comical moment, Champion turned to the weather map and discussed a big snowstorm in the northwestern United States. "This is a big system that brings winter to a lot of locations." The transcript is below.
Sam Champion: "Yeah and big, big, big news today in weather because we were the warmest in 2006 in the United States ever since they've been keeping records in the 1800's. That's from NOAA's national climactic data center. They have 1200 weather sites that they monitor every day. They took an average. Our average temperature was 55 degrees. Now that's warmer by 2.2 degrees than 1998. 1934 as well was the dust bowl year, and we were warmer than that. Every state in the nation above normal. New Jersey, their record hottest year ever."
"You're going to hear two terms a lot now. You're going to hear El Nino and global warming. El Nino is the weather pattern of this year with that warm air being pushed from the Pacific. It's why December was so warm. Global warming looks at the trend of weather, and for the past nine years we've been getting much, much, much warmer than the other stats. So those two together, that's how you hear it."
And then: "This is what's going on in the northwest. This is a big system that brings winter to a lot of locations. We're looking at snow along the coast in Washington and Oregon all the way down to sea level. And we'll see one to two inches of snow in Seattle. This will spread an awful lot of cold air and snow through the nation. It's another hit for Denver, and other big snow for the midwest."
Could this display be a response to a recent blog?