Joe Witte, a meteorologist for News Channel 8 in Virginia and Maryland, hopes that people watching his television forecasts will think about more than just the weather.

Two years ago, Mr. Witte started to include phenomena linked with climate change in his reports, like how warmer conditions affect life in Chesapeake Bay and prospects for recreation in the area.

Changes in the bay’s temperature have been “large and significant,” Mr. Witte said. “That’s a scientific curve we can show on the air and then ask viewers, ‘Will your children and grandchildren still be able to go crabbing?”’

Presenters like Mr. Witte are still rarities. Among public figures, television weather presenters are relative latecomers to leading efforts to deepen knowledge about climate change.

Wary of offending viewers and the authorities, who might be skeptical about the effect of human beings on climate, and mindful of making references to hugely complex science during three-minute broadcasts, most presenters have studiously avoided using their prime-time slots to discuss global warming.

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But that may be changing.

In September, the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency based in Geneva, anointed television weather presenters as climate emissaries, highlighting the role they could play in communicating evidence and information about global warming directly to viewers.

That overture to weather presenters is part of a broader drive by the United Nations to bring the discipline of predicting the weather, which is the state of the atmosphere at a particular time in a particular place, closer to the discipline of predicting climate, which is the average of weather over periods of months to thousands and millions of years.

The goal of the organization is to create a suite of climate services to help governments, farmers, businesses and citizens anticipate new kinds of conditions and adapt accordingly. The initiative also could expand the responsibilities of weather presenters, and groups already have sprung up to create a steady supply of content about climate change.

“Our goal is to change weathercasts into envirocasts,” said Deborah Sliter, a senior vice president of the National Environmental Education Foundation, an American organization that has offered presenters ideas to mention on air, like the blooming of lilacs an average of four days earlier in the spring in the United States than during the 1950s.

The United Nations is highlighting the role that weather presenters could play in communicating information to the public about global warming. A meteorologist with the Weather Channel in Atlanta, Georgia. Credit Chris Rank/Bloomberg News

Citing a recent study, Ms. Sliter said weather presenters tended to be the most trusted source of climate information for people after scientists, family and friends — hence their huge potential to raise awareness. “They are stars in their own communities,” she said.

Presenters caution that it may take some time yet for on-air references to climate change to become commonplace during forecasts.

The chief meteorologist of NBC 6 WTVJ in Miami, John Morales, said recent academic research had showed that about half of U.S. weather presenters were actually skeptics of climate change. Of those, about one-third shared the views of broadcasters like John Coleman, who helped found the Weather Channel, an American cable network. He has called global warming “a scam.”

Other obstacles include links between governments and the media.

In Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has voiced skepticism about the need for action on the climate, and where he owns or indirectly controls the majority of television stations, weather professionals often avoid talking about the climate for fear of losing their jobs, said Luca Mercalli, the president of the Italian Meteorological Society and a meteorologist for Rai 3.

Weather professionals acknowledge that they cannot predict weather with much accuracy more than seven to ten days ahead. Moreover, computers have not yet been built that might be able to predict what will happen several years from now in well-defined regions.

Even getting seasonal forecasts right still poses problems.

In April, the Met Office predicted that Britain was “odds on for a barbecue summer.” But when it turned out very differently, commentators ridiculed the forecasters. The Met Office revised its seasonal forecast in late July in the wake of heavy rains.

Presenters are quick to underline that natural variability can be as important as the effects of global warming when making extended forecasts. They also warn that stretching science to explain daily weather events could hurt their profession and, perhaps more seriously, squander good will among viewers to make sacrifices to help the climate.

“People continue to believe us about the weather even though we are sometimes wrong,” said Jill Peeters, a meteorologist at the Flemish channel VTM who has written a book and made a documentary on climate change. “If I say that warming is responsible for forest fires in Greece and then Europe suddenly goes through a period of much colder weather, I wonder whether people would be as forgiving.”

Mr. Witte said the most common complaint from viewers so far was that he had ignored the role of the sun in climate variability. In response, he has underlined how small changes in the atmosphere are far more powerful influences on climate than the sun.

But Mr. Witte said he so far had resisted any temptation to suggest ways in which Americans should change their behavior to temper the greenhouse effect.

Discussing climate “quickly becomes a series of policy questions, and that is where people divide very, very quickly,” he said. “As much as I would like to say things like that, I hold off.”

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