It’s a Hoax! — 3
Featuring: Weatherman John Coleman
“Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air — not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.”
- Businessman Donald Trump, January 29, 2014 (via Twitter)[1]
While Crichton dreamed up ‘fictional’ climate change hoaxes in his own bestseller conspiracy theories, an equally influential non-‘fictional’ Denialist emerged, who was willing to name the guilty. Unlike John Nolte (who eventually was forced to admit there is significant warming), John Coleman (1934–2018) denied to his dying day that there was any warming whatsoever. Coleman was willing to name names — in his written editorials and “informative” videos he lists the perpetrators of the hoax.[1] Coleman was one of the best-known and influential weathermen in US television history. He founded The Weather Channel, a 24–7 national weather broadcast operation, which, by 2008 had a viewership of over 85 million.[2] He was a friendly, affable, comic, and eventually grandfatherly TV persona. One thing he was not, however, was a climate scientist.
His undergraduate degree was in Journalism. But it was not his lack of scientific bona fides that led him to ultimately resign from the presidency of the Weather Channel he himself founded and profited from.[3] He stepped down due to his politics, which he resolutely denied were ever political. Coleman made this political bias perfectly clear in his blog postings at his weather reporting workplace in San Diego for TV news station KUSI (owned by McKinnon Broadcasting Company, also known as Texas Television).
In 2007, Coleman elaborated on his hoax-theory by naming the culprits: “It [Rapid Anthropogenic Global Heating — RAGH!] is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it.”.[4] He identifies those who he thinks are responsible for pulling off this scam: “Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens.” [5]
According to Coleman, it is “liberal” media (by which he means nearly everyone except FOX and friends, like Breitbart), Democrats, environmentalists and a cabal of school teachers who are the culprits of perpetuating the scam of global warming. In his KUSI blog post he indicates who is involved in the conspiracy, but does not quite get to the “why” of the hoax-perpetrators aside from alluding vaguely to their “radical agenda” (which he does not clarify in this post).
In his half-hour video: “There Is No Significant Global Warming”, he hints at more of the reasons why and how the “scam” (his preferred term for climate science) was created and spread. The video has been excerpted, shared, and reposted under various titles such as “John Coleman of KUSI: How the Global Warming Scare Began”. Not surprisingly, he never addresses the science of Global Climate Destabilization, only political and economic aspects, as he sees them.[6]
Of particular note are his unhinged attacks on former Vice-President Al Gore and Coleman’s fear of one-world government. These all lead to the conclusion which most resoundingly makes it clear who Coleman holds responsible for perpetuating the hoax: environmental organizations.[7] Here is his final speech which begins at 34:30+.
“Now, what’s going to defeat this global warming scare? I don’t think we…[laughs] .. .it’s like a David and Goliath. I don’t think we can defeat 4.7 billion dollars the Democrat Party, the United Nations, … uh and the Sierra Club, and the Wildlife Federation and all of them. Uh.. they just claim that we’re deniers and old goats and … [chuckle]… they think we’re bought and paid for by the, by the, the… Big Oil companies, which we are not. Uh… don’t have anything to do with them. But I don’t think we can defeat them.”
The ever-cheerful John Coleman will not let his audience hang there with a hopeless note in the air as Big One-World [Socialist] Government takes over the world by scaremongering the Global Warming hoax. Coleman continues by giving his audience of already true Denialist-believers a heart-warming message of hope:
“You know what’s gonna defeat them? Time. A few more bitterly cold winters, a turn toward a colder climate, when the global warming fails to materialize, in time, people will begin to believe, and I have noted a recent, a recent Gallup poll shows that more and more people are saying, ‘Global warming, that’s not the big deal’. We got a lot of big deals going on, you know, uh… employment, uh… jobs, uh… government too big, yeah that sort of thing? The list of their concerns is very interesting, those are on it, but global warming is down towards the bottom of the list.”
As it turns out, Time has not defeated the scientists who have researched the causes and now witness the effects of global climate destabilization. Time has culled many who were neither scientists nor Denialists. Some of them have burned to death in climate-fuelled fires; some have drowned in climate erratic floods; others have perished from the effects of climate-intensified hurricanes; some have been crushed to death or smothered in climate-triggered debris flows and mudslides.
Some have died of more ‘natural’ causes, like John Coleman.
One of Coleman’s friends wrote in his obituary, “He had a personality that was brighter than the sun. Today, we’re basking in its glow.” But we will probably be doing more than simply basking in the sun’s glow for centuries to come — we will likely be baking painfully in its glare, in no small part thanks to influential Denialists like John Coleman himself.[8]
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[1] For better or worse, since I began research on Coleman, YouTube seems to have removed nearly all of Coleman’s videos from their service in 2020. Some may still be located using archiving services but I continue to write about them here as a matter of historical record.
[2] Charles Homans, “Hot Air: Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?” January/February 2010. Columbia Journalism Review. https://archives.cjr.org/cover_story/hot_air.php This is a superb analysis of the media shifts of the mid 2000s in which weathermen become increasingly vocal in their rejection of climate science.
[3] The unsourced site Networthlist.org places Coleman’s estate at approximately $18 million as of March 15, 2019. https://www.networthlist.org/john-coleman-net-worth-244367
[4] The full quote comes from Coleman’s personal blog. It is reproduced by the Foreign Staff at The Telegraph, “Weather Channel boss calls global warming the greatest scam in history” The Telegraph, November 9, 2007. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3313785/Weather-Channel-boss-calls-global-warming-the-greatest-scam-in-history.html
[5] A rather extensive record of Coleman’s denialist statements can be found at Desmog, a blog that tracks denialists and their claims. See their entry for John Coleman at Desmogblog: https://www.desmogblog.com/john-coleman
[6] KUSI News, “John Coleman of KUSI: How the Global Warming Scare Began” March 13, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P5RW0Tmp-U John Coleman never uses the word “hoax” in this particular video, though his depiction of the idea of Global Climate Destabilization as a scam and the listing of conspiratorial culprits make it clear that he views it as such.
[7] Evan Lehmann, “Merchants of Doubt about Global Warming Hope to Strike Back” Scientific American, March 9, 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/merchants-of-doubt-about-global-warming-hope-to-strike-back/
[8] David Garrick “San Diego’s high-kicking weatherman John Coleman dies” The San Diego Union-Tribune (Weather section), January 21, 2018. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/weather/sd-me-john-coleman-20180121-story.html
