an excerpt from the introduction to the piece:
Only one problem: climate change threatens to screw up the formula. That phenomenon has complicated weather coverage by inserting human (that is, fossil fuel) politics where only the periodically awesome destructive power of nature and raw human emotion once were. All too often, bad weather may now be traced back, at least in part, to our endless burning of fossil fuels. On the whole, however, onscreen news coverage continues to ignore that reality even as it features the weather ever more prominently. In a sense, the news has been coopting climate change. A small sign of this is the way the tag “extreme weather” has become commonplace as reports of floods ravaging the Southwest, fires the West, and tornadoes the South and the Great Plains proliferate. Extreme weather, in other words, has gained its place in our consciousness largely shorn of the crucial factor in that extremity: the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases humanity has been dumping into the atmosphere.
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