One Meteorologist’s Come-to-Jesus Moment on Climate Change

Like many TV weathermen, Stu Ostro didn’t believe in climate change—until extreme weather and scientific evidence changed his mind.

<a href="https://plus.google.com/+TheWeatherChannel/posts/EkXVAo3GYjS">Weather Channel</a>/Google+


Ever since he was a kid, Stu Ostro has been, in his own words, “obsessed with the weather.” One day when he was around 11, he recalls, a lighting strike hit the house across the street in Somerville, New Jersey, while he and his brother watched from their porch—sending fire trucks scrambling, and the French fries that Ostro was eating “went flying.” Back then, Ostro’s weather fascination manifested as a “phobia” of thunder and lightning; nowadays, as a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel and head of its team of tornado and hurricane specialists, his obsession takes a rather different form. Try perusing his 1,072-slide-long and ever-growing PowerPoint on extreme and unusual weather phenomena—and how they may relate to climate change—and you’ll get some sense of it.

Ostro will speak at this Thursday’s Climate Desk Live on “The Alarming Science Behind Climate Change’s Increasingly Wild Weather” alongside Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis, whose work on how the warming of the Arctic is driving wacky weather complements his own theorizing. But Ostro didn’t always fit this billing, because he didn’t always buy into fears about global warming. As he puts it, he used to be a “vehement skeptic…not only about a human role in global warming, but also the idea that there was anything unusual about any weather we had been seeing.”

Indeed, circa 1999 Ostro could be found in USA Weekend expressing uncertainty as to “whether humans are contributing to climate change or not.” In this, Ostro channeled the views of many of his fellow TV weather forecasters, who have long nourished a skeptical streak, as a group, towards the notion of human-caused climate change.

“A lot of them are still where I was at,” Ostro explains.

Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro Image courtesy of Stu Ostro

So what changed? Ostro’s conversion was gradual, but the clincher was the stupefying hurricane season of 2005. Remember when forecasters ran out of letters of alphabet to name storms—Katrina, Rita, Wilma—and ultimately had to resort instead to the Greek alphabet (Epsilon, Zeta)?  By the end of the next year, Ostro had decided, as he put it in an email, that he could “no longer accept the mantra of ‘individual weather events can’t be connected to global warming.'” Rather, he now views climate and weather as intricately connected—you change the one, you inevitably change the other. Or as he puts it in his mega PowerPoint presentation: “Climate is a book, weather is chapters and pages.”

As an overworked forecaster in 2005, Ostro was noticing much more than the dizzying number of storms. It was the overarching atmospheric patterns conducive to storm formation that really caught his attention—and that led him to conclude that “something ain’t right with the weather.” 

More specifically, Ostro began noticing a pattern of what’s called increasing atmospheric thickness. In other words, the vertical distance between the Earth’s surface and various higher levels of the atmosphere (identified by their atmospheric pressure) was growing. To explain this, Ostro uses the helpful analogy of baking a loaf of bread. “You put dough in the oven, it rises,” he says. “Same thing in the atmosphere.” With increasing heat, the atmospheric ridges of high pressure (regions in which air is falling, rather than rising) were higher, taller, on average. “The frequency of these really strong ridges of high pressure aloft, these anomalous high pressures aloft are increasing,” Ostro explains—with profound consequences.

Strong high pressure ridges are tough to alter. They’re persistent, and so is the weather that accompanies them. It could be a long heat wave; or it could be rain or snow for days on end. “The crazy snow in China, the cold in parts of Europe and Asia this winter, and extreme flooding, and heat waves, it’s driving all of that,” Ostro says. The outcomes are variable—but the extremes are often powerful enough to have dramatic consequences in terms of human lives and also economic losses.

Climate scientists can be a tad condescending towards meteorologists.

Ostro says he has voted for Democrats, Republicans, and libertarians. But his neutral stance on politics hasn’t kept the trolls away. Recently one commenter wrote, “Stu, how does it feel to have your name permanently attached to the biggest media weather hoax in the history of mankind?” One conservative blogger, meanwhile, dubbed him “Mr. Ostroass” and described his “charming ability to repeat Leftist government talking points while miring in his own idiocy.” There were even “a couple of comments which I intercepted before they made it to the site that were threatening,” Ostro notes. That hasn’t stopped him: His PowerPoint documenting eerie weather extremes, ranging from an unheard-of Brazilian hurricane to seasonally odd tornadoes, just gets longer and longer.

So why don’t more of Ostro’s fellow weathermen follow the evidence from the atmosphere, and from the weather maps that they look at every day—just as he has done? “As meteorologists,” Ostro explains, “we are used to always seeing extremes in weather, and we know there have been extremes for as long as there’s been weather. So it might be a little extra hard to convince us that anything out of the ordinary is going on.”

As Ostro adds, it doesn’t help that on occasion, some climate scientists can be a tad condescending towards meteorologists—who apply a sophisticated tradecraft in their work, but aren’t usually known as great physicists or atmospheric theorists. Not all have advanced scientific degrees. Some were originally trained as journalists.

But the wilder weather gets, the harder it is to ignore—most of all for those who analyze it daily. So perhaps some inroads are slowly being made among television meteorologists—nearly two-thirds of which, according to a 2010 study, erroneously think global warming is mostly “natural,” not human caused. Ostro himself still remains cautious—he isn’t ready to connect the past few weeks’ tornado disasters to global warming, and he also questions the early forecasts of a bad 2013 hurricane season. But nevertheless, he knows that, because of climate change, all weather is changing—because all weather now occurs in a different atmosphere.

“The word that I use over and over in every talk,” Ostro says, “is ‘context.'”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate