The cover story in the current issue of CJR, about why climate skepticism is so common among television weather forecasters, is a must read. With the onset of winter, and abnormally cold temperatures around the globe, it could not come any sooner.

The Observatory has commented numerous times on the confusion in the media between short-term weather patterns, like the current cold threatening Florida’s strawberry crops, and long-term climate trends such as global warming. Part and parcel of that is the strong vein of skepticism about the latter among television weather personalities. They are the “gateway” to the news for many Americans (the weather reporter often being the most popular segment of local news broadcasts) and often serve as the de facto “voice” of science at their respective stations.

Our cover story is by Charles Homans, an editor at the The Washington Monthly, who catalogues a number of recent efforts by groups on both sides of the climate policy debate to woo weather forecasters. “For all of their differing agendas, the outfits have one thing in common,” Homans writes, “they have all realized that, however improbably, the future of climate-change policy in the United States rests to a not-insubstantial degree on the well-tailored shoulders of the local weatherman.”

Homans also dives deep into the history, training, and psychology of television weather forecasting to assess why climate skepticism is so prominent there. The explanation starts with the fact, as Homans puts it, that:

Meteorology has a deceptively close relationship with climatology: both disciplines study the same general subject, the behavior of the atmosphere, but they ask very different questions about it. Meteorologists live in the short term, the day-to-day forecast. It’s an incredibly hard thing to predict accurately, even with the best models and data; tiny discrepancies matter enormously, and can pile up quickly into giant errors. Given this level of uncertainty in their own work, meteorologists looking at long-range climate questions are predisposed to see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability. But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all.

Of course, skepticism of models and forecasting doesn’t explain why weatherman have “disregarded the mountain of evidence of global warming that has already occurred,” Homans cautions. His conclusion is that, paradoxically, much of the larger problem dates back to American Meteorological Society efforts to improve the professionalism and expertise of television weathermen:

The AMS had succeeded in making many weathercasters into responsible authorities in their own wheelhouse, but somewhere along the way that narrow professional authority had been misconstrued as a sort of all-purpose scientific legitimacy. It had bolstered meteorologists’ sense of their expertise outside of their own discipline, without necessarily improving the expertise itself. Most scientists are loath to speak to subjects outside of their own field, and with good reason—you wouldn’t expect a dentist to know much about, say, the geological strata of the Grand Canyon. But meteorologists, by virtue of typically being the only people with any science background at their stations, are under the opposite pressure—to be conversant in anything and everything scientific.

Whatever the case may be, better explanations and delineations of weather and climate phenomena continue to be needed in newsrooms. In its daily news round-up on Thursday, the Society of Environmental Journalists cited a blog post from Jack Williams—a long-time weather reporter and editor for USA Today who retired in 2005—with the headline, “Science Stories about Arctic Blasts Missing in Action.”

“The New Year has brought us a blizzard of stories about frigid temperatures and snow storms,” Williams wrote, “but I’ve been unable to find any stories that closely examine what’s going on.”

Curtis Brainard is the editor of The Observatory, CJR's online critique of science and environment reporting. Follow him on Twitter @cbrainard.