In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, meteorologists have faced an unprecedented wave of threats and harassment, according to James Marshall Shepherd, a former NASA weather scientist who is currently director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric sciences program. Some have received messages stating that scientists should be killed; others have been cursed and told to shut up. Social media posts have also targeted FEMA workers, suggesting they should be beaten, arrested, shot, or hung on sight.
Climate change skeptics have long accused weather forecasters of pushing what they view as a “climate change agenda,” Shepherd said. But things took an ugly turn this month when conspiracy theorists denounced scientists for covering up a supposed government plot to engineer the weather and send storms to Florida and North Carolina. “In the past, the harassment was over in a fringe element,” Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society, said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “In this last episode, it was bit more mainstream.”
Disinformation, spread mostly over social media platforms, has made the already stressful job of tracking extreme weather even more so, he said. Such campaigns can also threaten human life if people refuse to heed forecasters’ warnings or if beleaguered emergency workers can’t do their jobs.
To combat disinformation and educate the public about weather and climate, Shepherd and other meteorologists have taken to social media themselves. But he acknowledges that not everyone will be receptive: Trust in science and scientists is, in some communities, at an all time low. That’s especially worrisome, Shepherd said, because extreme weather will only “ramp up more unless we act and reduce carbon emissions.”
James Marshall Shepherd. Dustin Chambers/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Yale Environment 360: Meteorologists have faced harassment for years over climate-change issues. Is what we’ve seen recently a continuation of that or are we in new territory here?
James Marshall Shepherd: Climate scientists have dealt with climate trolls, skeptics, and deniers for decades now; I think it’s an extension of that. The tone and volume of the harassment picked up quite a bit during these most recent two hurricanes. Now, some of that is, I think, just related to the fact that we’re in an election year. Back in 2012, I remember some similar claims that people were making about Superstorm Sandy, that the government was creating it to disrupt the election. The difference is, in the past the harassment was over in a fringe element. In this last episode, it was a bit more mainstream. That’s concerning.
e360: When you tell people that you’re a meteorologist, what kind of reactions do you get?
Shepherd: You get a lot of, “Oh, climate change is natural,” or “It’s just a hoax. You guys are making that up to get grant money.” The irony is I used to have people come up to me and say, “You climate scientists are full of it. Mankind can’t change our weather and climate.” Yet now some of these same critics are pushing conspiracy theories saying that we were controlling hurricanes or creating storms, and then attacking us when we refute them with real science.
e360: There’s not a lot of logic behind much of this.
Shepherd: A conspiracy theory makes it easier for them to grasp and to align with things they already believe or want to believe. There’s a whole psychology to it. There’s still a group of people that just don’t want to buy climate change.
“There are climate scientists that have left the field. I think that’s part of the intent of the harassment. They want to shut us up.”
e360: What have you been hearing from your colleagues about the emotional impact of dealing with these storms and with the bullying that accompanied them?
Shepherd: In the lead up to Helene and Milton I had this pit in my stomach. You are forecasting or analyzing data that shows that a major storm is going to kill people, or going to destroy their lives or their property. That in itself takes a mental toll. But to then throw on top of that harassment and skepticism. James Spann, a very well-known TV meteorologist in Birmingham, Alabama, said, “You’re working with two to three hours of sleep for multiple weeks under a high-stress situation, and then you deal with these threats that come in, it’ll beat you down.”
e360: Have you seen meteorologists who’ve just burned out?
Shepherd: Some promising young meteorologists get out of our field just because the sheer volume of things that they’re having to do now, as opposed to in the past, where they just perhaps stood in front of a screen and gave the weather every day. They’re doing social media, they’re having to file environmental reports, lots of things that they probably just didn’t anticipate.
There are also climate scientists that have suffered the brunt of threats or harassment and have left the field. But I think that’s part of the intent of the harassment, in the trolling. They want to shut us up.
James Spann via Twitter
e360: People become scientists to engage in research that expands human knowledge. Many don’t want to get involved in politics, and yet they’re being dragged into it.
Shepherd: I don’t think we need to. I don’t get involved in politics. I do testify before Congress and advise the White House, those types of things. But I don’t inherently see any of this as political. I think others try to make it political. My philosophy has long been to just state the facts from my position as an expert.
e360: You make a distinction between misinformation, which is unintentional, and disinformation, which is intentional.
Shepherd: Yeah. False information imperils lives. We’ve seen that when people fail to heed warnings or threaten emergency responders. FEMA had to change some of their operations because of threats their folks were receiving.
e360: You mentioned that you are active on social media. Why is that important for you?
Shepherd: The majority of people now get their weather information from apps and social media, not turning on a TV news channel. It’s a lot more difficult to trace out what’s credible in those formats. I think scholars like me, if we aren’t engaged, then the void that we leave behind will be filled by people with agendas. We’ve got to have a vaccine to the infectious information that’s out there.
“Milton went from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours. This is really a fingerprint of climate change.”
e360: There are people who think that the federal government, and the Biden administration, is steering hurricanes toward red states.
Shepherd: We don’t have any technology to do that. I’m an expert in weather and climate: I say that unequivocally because I know it’s true. But there’s been sort of this push in society now where expertise is not trusted.
e360: How well did meteorologists do in their forecasts for hurricanes Helene and Milton?
Shepherd: With Helene we were very clear that it would produce excessive rainfall in the mountains and in Georgia. But some people didn’t grasp it because they don’t have benchmarks for something they haven’t experienced. These were significantly anomalous events, [which] we’re going to see more of. People said, “Oh, yeah, it’s just a hurricane. There’s going to be a lot of rain.” But we were saying days ahead there was going to be “excessive rainfall, 20 to 30 inches.” That’s exactly what happened.
With the second hurricane, Milton, there was an over-fixation [in the media] with the category of storms. The Saffir-Simpson scale [which assigns numbers to the strength of hurricanes] is a wind scale. Oftentimes that’s what the media focuses on, and the public tends to fixate on. Many [meteorologists] were pleading to move away from focusing so much on category and wind because the deadliest aspect of any hurricane, the studies have shown consistently, is water — whether it’s the storm surge, or the inland freshwater flooding from rainfall.
Wreckage left by Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina, September 30, 2024. Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
e360: You’ve spoken a lot about what you call the “weather gap,” the difference between the way extreme weather events affect poor people, and the way that they affect the more affluent. The wealthy often live in safer places and can afford to protect themselves.
Shepherd: It’s much broader than income. This extreme weather climate gap really touches on any vulnerable community — whether it’s poor communities, communities of color, the very young, elderly — these communities are disproportionately impacted. They [often] have less resiliency or adaptive capacity. You’re right, there were people in those same regions that were equally exposed and impacted, but they had the means to get in their car, maybe go to Atlanta, and stay in a hotel for a week.
e360: Forecasts are getting more accurate in general, but we still don’t know everything about hurricane intensity, right?
Shepherd: The track forecasts have improved significantly. We still have a ways to go with the intensity forecast, and we know why. Track forecasts are governed more by the large steering conditions of the atmosphere that the models can pick up. But the intensity forecasts are governed by the ocean heat content, by the convection that’s happening inside the clouds. These are things we don’t often have readily available data on to go into the model. The energetics associated with hurricane intensification are related to things that aren’t governed or explained as well by the large-scale models.
e360: Climate change is shuffling the deck so quickly that it’s hard to totally keep up with.
Shepherd: That’s why I’m very comfortable saying that these are climate change hurricanes. We know hurricanes happen naturally. They’re supposed to happen in September and October. But the Gulf of Mexico was anomalously warm. You’re getting these more intense storms, and they’re rapidly intensifying. I think with Milton, it went from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours. This explosive development is really a fingerprint of climate change.
It’s daunting to see it coming almost exactly as we said it would. What’s even more concerning is that we’re at the beginning of it. We’ll start to see it ramp up even more unless we act and reduce carbon emissions.
