It was a pleasant surprise two nights ago, watching CNN International, when the weather person (a non-American) admitted that our weather problems are caused by climate change.  Not sunspots, not natural variabilities, but climate change.  She was adamant about this fact, and sounded rather defiant when she said climate change will have to be addressed.  It was a brief moment and it sounded unplanned.  An even better moment came on ABC News from the previous week, when for the very first time (to my knowledge) a mainstream broadcast U.S. media segment on the weather said very clearly that our wild weather of the past year has been caused by climate change.

The best part of the segment is that they did not turn the report into a false debate on climate change by presenting “the other side” of the story.  That would be the false side.  Every other time climate change has been presented on mainstream U.S. broadcast media, there has always been some ridiculous “climate change denier” giving his or her side of things.  This is a major hurdle that U.S. media seems to have finally gotten over.  They no longer feel the need to present fraudulent, non-scientific information on their news broadcasts.  I don’t think people in other countries can truly appreciate what a major event this is.  Climate Progress wrote about it like this:

Parts of the media are starting to connect the dots — see New York Times front-page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming! Trenberth: “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

What follows is the Nightline story, which is pretty good, though not as thorough as the ABC evening news story . . . “

You can see the Nightline story here.