“Why are so many of us glued to ‘weather porn’? It’s as if the hour-by-hour dramatic accounts are so much more exciting than actually concerning ourselves with what’s causing it all – namely climate change.”
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We need to be keeping cool:
How to cope with the heat wave – Vision Group for Sidmouth
But we also need to be keeping an eye on the bigger picture, as a local commentator suggests:
“Why are so many of us glued to ‘weather porn’? It’s as if the hour-by-hour dramatic accounts are so much more exciting than actually concerning ourselves with what’s causing it all – namely climate change.”
When it comes to the epithet ‘weather porn’, it’s certainly been used by ‘climate sceptics’ annoyed at the ‘overplaying’ of the climate crisis:
CNN Pushes Weather Porn With Climate Change And Hurricanes – Iowa Climate Science Education
However, it’s not just the ‘climate sceptics’ who are annoyed – with this report from Fox News from 2016:
Smartphones and social media have made video of dramatic weather, crashing waves and whiteouts of snow more readily available than a decade ago. Typhoon Hagupit in the Philippines wasn’t as bad as anticipated and struck far from an American audience last weekend, but ABC and CBS both ran storm video Monday evening. The images were arresting. The concern is that video makes weather stories catnip to producers, irresistible even with limited news value, said Patrick Burkey, “Nightly News” executive producer.
Others use a more blunt term: weather porn. The extra time spent on these stories can’t be explained by an increased frequency of or interest in bad weather, and they’re rarely used in context of a discussion about climate change, news consultant Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the content of the broadcasts, said. “If Ginger Zee reported in the role of climatologist rather than meteorologist, I would praise ABC’s ‘World News Tonight’s’ decision as a daring intervention into a crucial national and global debate,” he said. “Instead, she is more like a pornographer.”
Weather porn? Network newscasts spending more time on dramatic weather | Fox News
Writing in the midst of all of this ‘weather’, George Monbiot certainly thinks we should be concerning ourselves with the thing we haven’t been concerned with:
Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust…