The Weather Channel's Forecast for 2050 Veers Closer to Doomsday

The Weather Channel's three most recognizable names, Sam Champion, Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams, are featured in a new video that highlights the threats of climate change. The video shows a hypothetical weather forecast in the year 2050, using technical wizardry and relying on climate science projections.

Perhaps because it's such a familiar format — a daily TV weathercast — the segment is a surprisingly effective way at driving home how global warming could manifest itself in daily weather patterns by mid-century. It also represents an aggressive, almost advocacy-oriented, move on the part of The Weather Channel, which began covering climate change more routinely during the past two years after virtually ignoring it entirely for several years. In 2008, for example, the station canceled its weekly global warming show during NBC's annual "Green Week." (The network is owned in part by NBC.)

The video, which is part of a series produced for the World Meteorological Organization ahead of the U.N. Climate Summit later this month, includes global warming impacts such as sea level rise and intense, long-lasting drought.

The scenarios illustrated here are based upon recent peer-reviewed scientific findings, particularly the 2013 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the more recent National Climate Assessment. For example, the projection that the Southwest will get drier is widely agreed upon by the mainstream climate science community, and scientists and policymakers have already expressed growing concern about the risks that sea level rise poses to coastal cities like Miami.

Sea Level Rise

Sea level rise projection from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In one memorable scene, meteorologist Jim Cantore standing in a flooded South Beach in Miami, due to the combination of a fictional offshore hurricane and sea level rise. "A storm that's over 400 miles offshore would never be a problem many decades ago," Cantore says, "but now that we have sea level rise, even a storm that's over 400 miles offshore, can still cause big problems like you see here."

While the portrayal of Miami might seem far-fetched, it's not far off from what studies show.

According to research by Climate Central, a nonprofit research and journalism organization, 3.4 feet of sea level rise is likely in Miami by 2100, compared to the 2012 sea level height. This translates to a 17% cumulative risk of at least one flood exceeding 3 feet by 2030, a nearly 50% risk by 2050, and a 100% risk by the end of the century. Under higher-end sea level rise scenarios, which assume greater melting of the polar ice sheets, there would be a 100% chance of at least one flood rising above 6 feet by the year 2100. This would put about $15 billion worth of property at risk.

Sam Champion, who anchors the cable network's weekday morning show, also introduces a segment with a teaser: "The Arctic Circle: Why it's becoming the place to go." The segment highlights Edmonton, Alberta, as a growing city because of its "pleasant fall weather" compared to the heat and humidity of Chicago and other U.S. cities, and in it, Champion says that Anchorage, Alaska, will be the host of the 2060 Summer Olympic games.

Abrams details the "mega-drought" in the Southwest, which has lasted for decades. This isn't all that implausible, actually, considering all of California is currently mired in a multi-year drought, with groundwater increasingly becoming depleted and towns worrying about wells running dry.

Although it mainly uses well-established climate science findings on heat waves and sea level rise, the WMO's video series is not without its critics, who say it highlights fictional scenarios to manipulate people into favoring taking action on climate change.

It's unusual to see TV broadcasters, especially high-profile personalities like Cantore and Champion, take part in advocacy campaigns like this one, although the WMO's effort is aimed more at raising awareness of what's at stake in upcoming climate talks than it is at pushing a particular solution.

Image: The Weather Channel

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