英语翻译I am more than happy in your reply to my mail.How is your day?.Mine is a little bit hot over here in refugee camp here in Dakar Senegal.It’s just like one staying in the prison and i hope by Gods grace i will come out here soon if you help me.i am using pastor computer and that is the i tuke when i was in my country.I don't have any brother,sister or relatives now whom i can go to,all my relatives ran away in the middle of the war the only person i have now is Rev John Martin!s who is the pastor of the (HOPE OF GLORY CHURCH) here in the camp,he has been very nice to me since i came here but i am not living with him rather i am leaving in the woman's hostel because the camp have two hostels one for men the other for women.The Pastors Tel number is 00-221-768-626-764 if you call tell him that you want to speak with Vivian David so that he will send for me .you know As a refugee here i don't have any right or privilege to any thing be it money or whatever because it is against the law of this country.I want to go back to my studies because i only attended my first year before the tragic incident which leads me into this situation.Please listen to this,I have my late father's statement of account and death certificate here with me which i will send to you latter,because when he was alive he deposited some amount of money in a leading bank in Europe which he used my name as the next of kin,the amount in question is!$8.6M(Eight point six Million Dollars).So i will like you to help me transfer this money to your account and from it you can send some money for me to get my traveling documents and air ticket to come over to meet with you.I kept this secret to people in the camp here the only person that knows about it is the Reverend because he is like a father to me.So in the light of above i will like you to keep it to yourself and don't tell it to anyone because i am afraid of loosing my life and the money if people get to know about it.Remember i am giving you all this information due to the trust i have on you.I like honest and understanding people,truthful and a man of vision,truth and hard working.My favorite language is English but very fluently.Mean while i will like you to call me like i said i have allot to tell you.
哇,不要理他啊!这是一个诈骗集团.美国电视上纰漏过不少次了.
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＞＞＞--- ? --- Yes. W-A-T-C-H, watch.A．Is it a watchB．Can you ..
--- &&&&&&? &&&&&&&--- Yes. W-A-T-C-H, watch.A．Is it a watchB．Can you spell watchC．How do you spell watchD．He can spell watch
题型：单选题难度：中档来源：不详
B试题分析：根据答语--是的，W-A-T-C-H，watch可知，本句应是问“你能拼一下watch一词吗？”A的意思是“它是手表吗？”D是“他能拼写watch；C的意思是”你怎样拼写watch。”B是“你能拼写一下watch吗？”，根据Yes可知，本句应用一般疑问句。故本题选B。考点:考查日常用语。
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据魔方格专家权威分析，试题“--- ? --- Yes. W-A-T-C-H, watch.A．Is it a watchB．Can you ..”主要考查你对&&日常用语、谚语，情景交际&&等考点的理解。关于这些考点的“档案”如下：
现在没空？点击收藏，以后再看。
因为篇幅有限，只列出部分考点，详细请访问。
日常用语、谚语情景交际
日常用语：就是日常生活中的交际用语，如Thank you. Sorry.等谚语：即是人们生活中常用的现成的话。谚语类似成语，但口语性强，通俗易懂，而且一般都表达一个完整的意思，形式上差不多都是一两个短句。例如：Helaughsbestwholaughslast.谁笑到最后，谁就笑得最好。&&&&&&&&&& &Nopains,nogains.没有付出，就没有收获。英语日常交际用语分类：打招呼与告别用语（Greeting and Saying Good-bye）1.－How are you ?&&&&&&& －I’m fine, thanks.2. －Nice to meet you.&&&& －Nice to meet you, too.
谈论颜色（Talking about colour）1. －What colour is& it?&&&& －It’s red.2. －What’s you favourite colour, Jenny?&&&&&& －My favourite colour is blue.3. －How many colours do you like?&&&&&&&&& －Three.
谈论高度（Talking about height）1. －Are you short or tall?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －I’m short／tall.2. －How tall am I, Mr Wood?&&&&&&&&&&&& －You’re 1.6 metres tall.
看病用语（Seeing a doctor）1. －What’s the matter?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －I cut my knee. It hurts.
就餐用语（Having meals）1. －Would you like some dumpling?&&&&&&&&&&&& －No, thanks.／ Yes please.2. I’d like porridge for breakfast.&&&&&&&& 3. It’s ／Thery’re delicious.4. What would you like for supper?5. －Are you ready to order?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －Yes, please. I’d like…….
谈论天气（Talking about weather）1 －How is the weather today?／ What’s the weather like today?－It’ sunny rainy snowy windy.2. －Is it snowy?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& － No , it’s hot today.3. －what’s the temperature?&&&&&&&&&&&&& － It’s 0 degrees.4. －Is it rainy?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －Yes, it’s rainy.5 It’s warm and windy in spring.6. －How’s the weather today, Steven?&&&&&&&& －It’s cold and snowy.7.－What’s the temperature outside, Kim?&&&&&& －It’s minus fifteen degress.8.What’s the temperature today? Is it warm or hot?9.It’s very cold\ hot today, isn’t it?10. It ‘s a cold day!11. what a cold day!&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 12. It’s getting warmer.
谈论时间和日期（Talking about time and date）1. －What time is it?／What’s the time?&&&&&& －It’s 7:00 a quarter to seven ten past seven.2. －What day is it?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －It’s Tuesday.3. －What’s the date?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －It’s October 30.
谈论年龄（Talking about age）1. －How old are you? What’s your age?&&&&&&&&& － I’m fourteen years old.2. She is very young.
谈论购物（Talking about shopping ）1.－May I help you ?／What can I do for you?&&& －I would like／want to buy a pencil, please.2. －How much is this are they?&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －Three yuan.3. I’ll take it.&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 4. Here’s your change.5. What colour kind would you like?&&&& 6. What about this one?7.I’m looking for a birthday present for my friend.8.Do you have any other sizes／ kinds?
谈论距离（Talking about distance）1. How far is it from China to Canada?&&&&&&&&&&& It’s about 8,500 kilometres.2. Beijing is far from our city.3. －How far is Beijing from here?&&&&&& －It’s about 7,000 kilometres miles away.
请求允许（Asking for permission）1. May I have some donuts, please?2. －May I have some grapes?&&&& －Sorry. We don’t have any grapes. But we have some pears.3. －what would you like, Mom?&&&&& －I would like a bowl of noodles.
指路（Showing the way）－Excuse me. Does the hotel have a computer?－Yes! I can show you. Go straight down this hall. Here it is!
道别用语（Saying good-bye）－Okay. See you later!&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& －See you later!
表扬与鼓励（Praise and encouragement）1.The gift is wonderful!&&&&&&&&&&& 2. You can do it.3.These chopsticks are beautiful!&&&& 4.Beijing is great!5.Very good!&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 6. Good work!7.Well done! ／ Wonderful! ／Excellent!&&& 8.You speak English very well!9.Keep trying!&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 10.You dress is beautiful!<e on!
谈论节日和季节（Talking about festivals and seasons）1. －What’s your favourtite festival ／season?&&&&&&&&&&&& － My favourite festival is Children’s Day. _My favourite seasons is fall are spring and winter.2. I like Teachers’ Day.3.I like winter because I like to ski and skate.&&&& 4.Spring in China is usually warm.5. There’re four seasons in a year.初中常用谚语：He is not fit to command others that cannot command himself.正人先正己。
He knows most who speaks least.大智若愚。
He who does not advance loses ground.逆水行舟，不进则退。
If you make yourself an ass, don't complain if people ride you.人善被人欺，马善被人骑。If you want knowledge, you must toil for it.要想求知，就得吃苦。
Industry is the parent of success.勤奋是成功之母。
It is better to die when life is a disgrace.宁为玉碎，不为瓦全。
It is easy to open a shop but hard to keep it always open.创业容易守业难。
It is hard to please all.众口难调。
It is never too old to learn.活到老，学到老。
It is no use crying over spilt milk.覆水难收。
It is the first step that costs troublesome.万事开头难。
It is the unforeseen that always happens.天有不测风云，人有旦夕祸福。
It is too late to grieve when the chance is past.坐失良机，后悔已迟。
It never rains but it pours.不鸣则已，一鸣惊人。 It takes three generations to make a gentleman.十年树木，百年树人。
Jack of all trades and master of none.门门精通，样样稀松。
Judge not from appearances.人不可貌相，海不可斗量。
Justice has long arms.天网恢恢，疏而不漏。
Keep good men company and you shall be of the number.近朱者赤，近墨者黑。
Kill two birds with one stone.一箭双雕。
Kings go mad, and the people suffer for it.君王发狂，百姓遭殃。
Kings have long arms.普天之下，莫非王土。
Knowledge is power.知识就是力量。
Knowledge makes humble, ignorance makes proud.博学使人谦逊，无知使人骄傲。 初中英语作文常用的谚语：1.Practice makes perfect. 熟能生巧。2.God helps those who help themselves. 天助自助者。3.Easier said than done. 说起来容易做起来难。4.Where there is a will，there is a way. 有志者事竟成。5.One false step will make a great difference. 失之毫厘，谬之千里。6.Slow and steady wins the race. 稳扎稳打无往而不胜。7.A fall into the pit，a gain in your wit. 吃一堑，长一智。8.Experience is the mother of wisdom. 实践出真知。9.All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. 只工作不玩耍，聪明孩子也变傻。10.Beauty without virtue is a rose without fragrance.无德之美犹如没有香味的玫瑰，徒有其表。11.More hasty，less speed. 欲速则不达。12.Its never too old to learn. 活到老，学到老。13.All that glitters is not gold. 闪光的未必都是金子。14.A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.千里之行始于足下。15.Look before you leap. 三思而后行。16.Rome was not built in a day. 伟业非一日之功。17.Great minds think alike. 英雄所见略同。18.well begun，half done. 好的开始等于成功的一半。19.It is hard to please all. 众口难调。20.Out of sight，out of mind. 眼不见，心不念。21.Facts speak plainer than words. 事实胜于雄辩。22.Call back white and white back. 颠倒黑白。23.First things first. 凡事有轻重缓急。24.Ill news travels fast. 坏事传千里。25.A friend in need is a friend indeed. 患难见真情。26.live not to eat，but eat to live. 活着不是为了吃饭，吃饭为了活着。27.Action speaks louder than words. 行动胜过语言。28.East or west，home is the best. 金窝银窝不如自家草窝。29.Its not the gay coat that makes the gentleman. 君子在德不在衣。30.Beauty will buy no beef. 漂亮不能当饭吃。31.Like and like make good friends. 趣味相投。32.The older， the wiser. 姜是老的辣。33.Do as Romans do in Rome. 入乡随俗。34.An idle youth，a needy age. 少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲。35.As the tree，so the fruit. 种瓜得瓜，种豆得豆。36.To live is to learn，to learnistobetterlive.活着为了学习，学习为了更好的活着。37. Where there is a will， there is a way. 有志者事竟成。38. Nothing is too difficult in the world if you set your mind into it. 世上无难事，只怕有心人。39. Every coin has two sides. 每枚硬币都有两面;凡事皆有好坏。40. Don‘t troubles trouble until trouble troubles you. 不要自找麻烦。41. No pains，no gains. 不劳无获情景交际:也叫口语应用,试题根据对话的基本形式是一问一答的特点，通过提供一定的语境，将语言放在交际的实际情景中去考查。它所涉及的内容多是初中英语课本中出现过的与学生学习、生活相联系、实用性强的内容。它既考查特定交际场合使用的表达方式，也通过语境考查词汇和语法知识的运用。情景交际题注意事项：1.所补全的对话内容必须能使上、下文连贯一致，因而必须瞻前顾后、全盘考虑，不能仅看上一个问句就选择答句，或仅根据下文中的答句就补全它的问句，否则容易造成逻辑错误。 2. 做题前应注意试题前面是否有中文或英语的背景提示。这些背景提示是确定话题内容的重要依据，不可疏忽带过。 3. 在选择过程中考生应注意把已选出的选项划去，避免重复选择的错误。 4. 做题时要先易后难，一时难以确定不要勉强先做，否则易造成连锁错误。 &解题思路与技巧：1. 通览全文，领会大意，揣摩话题。解题时应先跳过空格通览全文，了解对话大意，根据对大意的把握，判定语境，揣摩话题。&2. 根据语境，细读选项，选择答案。在把握话题和语境的基础上，针对对话的每一空白处，细读所提供的选项，认真分析它们之间的异同，依据对话有关情景内容，选择正确的答案。&3.通盘考虑，前后联想，先易后难。要从对话整体理解出发，依照上、下问答的逻辑顺序来考虑所选择的答案，不可不顾前后顺序，孤立地就上句就补下句，这样可能出现所补句子符合上文而不符合下文的情况。要先解决有把握的、容易的，再回头补选较难的。&4.通读对话，义形结合，验证答案。将对话补全之后，再将整段对话通读一遍，逐一验证答案。所选的答案不仅语义上要符合语境，而且要保证语言正确，做到说话得体。&&&&
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High quality Hot-rolled Steel H beam EN Series(HE , IPE) S275JR
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Place of Origin:
Shandong, China (Mainland)
Technique:
Hot Rolled
Application:
For bridges,vehicles,ships,constructions etc.
6-16m or as requested
Packaging & Delivery
Packaging Details:
Standard export package / as per request
Delivery Detail:
30 days after received the deposits
Product Description High quality Hot-rolled Steel H beam&EN Series(HE , IPE) S275JR 1. Standard: & &&EN10034, EN10025 2. Shape: &Hot Rolled H Beam&3. Size: HE100-500, IPE140-700&& 4. Grade: &S275JR 5.Length: 6-16m or as required&&6. Productivity: 5000 metric tons/month&&7. Delivery Date:&&30 days after received the deposits&8. payment terms: 1. T /T 30% in advance as deposit within 3 working days after the contract date, & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & balance before shipment& && & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & 2.T/T30% in advance as deposit,balance against the L/C at sight&& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & &3.Irrevocable L/C at sight ItemH&&&&& (mm)B&&&&& (mm)t1&&&& (mm)t2&&&& (mm)unit weight (kg/m)available lengthHE500A49030012231556-16mHE500B50030014.5281876-16mHE450A44030011.5211406-16mHE450B45030014261716-16mHE400A39030011191256-16mHE400B40030013.5241556-16mHE360A3503001017.51126-16mHE360B36030012.522.51426-16mHE340A3303009.516.51056-16mHE340B3403001221.51346-16mHE320A310300915.597.66-16mHE320B32030011.520.51276-16mHE300A2903008.51488.36-16mHE300B30030011191176-16mHE280A27028081376.46-16mHE280B28028010.5181036-16mHE260A2502607.512.568.26-16mHE260B2602601017.5936-16mHE240A2302407.51260.36-16mHE240B240240101783.26-16mHE220A21022071150.56-16mHE220B2202209.51671.56-16m& HE200A1902006.51042.36-16mHE200B20020091561.36-16mHE180A17118069.535.56-16mHE180B1801808.51451.26-16mHE160A1521606930.46-16mHE160B16016081342.66-16mHE140A1331405.58.524.76/10/12mHE140B14014071233.76/10/12mHE120A1141205819.96/10/12mHE120B1201206.51126.76/10/12mHEA100961005816.76/10/12mHEB10010010061020.46/10/12mIPE180180915.3818.86/10/12mIPE2002001005.68.522.46/10/12mIPE2402401206.29.830.76-16mIPE2702701356.610.236.16-16mIPE3303301607.511.549.16-16mIPE360360170812.757.16-16mIPE4004001808.613.566.36-16mIPE3003001507.110.742.26-16mIPE4504501909.414.677.66-16mIPE50050020010.21690.76-16m&&&&&&&Our Services&*Quality Steel:&Gear steel, Bearing steel, Construction alloy steel,&&&&&&&&&&& Carbon construction quality steel*Section Steel: H Beam, I Beam, F Beam, Channel*Deformed bar: Anchor bar,& rebar*Plate and stripe: Hot rolled plate, Cold rolled plate, chequered plate& &If you need or be interested in please contact us. &FAQ&What's&your&main&market?&We&mainly&export&to&Asia&such&as Pakistan,India,Brazil,Thailand&and South America&and&Middle&East.&Why&do&you&choose&to&cooperate&with&us?&We&have&over10&years&experience&in&this&business&so&we&are&able&to&provide&you&the&high&quality&products&with&the&best&price.&&OEM&is&allowed&and&welcome&you&to&visit&our&factory!&&Price&unstable,&please&don't&hesitate&to&contact&me&for&the&latest&price!&&&&&&We&will&reply&within&24&hours&for&sure!& &
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aisn-detailWhy don't TV weathermen believe in climate change?
The small makeup room off the main floor of KUSI&#8217;s studios, in a suburban canyon on the north end of San Diego, has seen better days. T the couch sags. John Coleman, KUSI&#8217;s weatherman, pulls off the brown sweatshirt he has been wearing over his shirt and tie all day and appraises himself in the mirror, smoothing back his white hair and opening a makeup kit. &#8220;I kid that I have to use a trowel, to fill the crevasses of age,&#8221; he says, swiping powder under one eye and then the other. &#8220;People have tried to convince me to use more advanced makeup, but I don&#8217;t. I don&#8217;t try to fool anyone.&#8221;
Coleman is seventy-five years old, and looks it, which is refreshing in the Dorian Gray-like environs of television news. He refers to his position at KUSI, a modestly eccentric independent station in San Diego whose evening newscast usually runs fifth out of five in the local market, as his retirement job. When he steps in front of the green screen, it&#8217;s clear why he has chosen it ov in front of the camera he moves, if not quite like a man half his age, then at least like a man three quarters of it. His eyes light up, and the slight stoop with which he otherwise carries himself disappears. His rumble of a voice evens out into a theatrical baritone, full of the practiced jocularity of someone who has spent all but the first nineteen years of his life on TV.
By his own rough estimate, John Coleman has performed more than a quarter million weathercasts. It is not a stretch to say that he is largely responsible for the shape of the modern weather report. As the first weatherman on ABC&#8217;s Good Morning America in the late 1970s and early &#8217;80s, Coleman pioneered the use of the onscreen satellite technology and computer graphics that are now standard nearly everywhere. In 1982, chafing at the limitations of his daily slot on GMA, Coleman used his spare time&#8212;and media mogul Frank Batten&#8217;s money&#8212;to launch The Weather Channel. The idea seemed quixotic then, and his tenure as president ended a year later after an acrimonious split with Batten. But time proved Coleman to be something of a genius&#8212;the channel was turning a profit within four years, and by the time NBC-Universal bought it in 2008 it had 85 million viewers and a $3.5 billion price tag.
Those were the first two acts of Coleman&#8217;s career. On a Sunday night in early November 2007, Coleman sat down at his home computer and started to write the 967 words that would launch the third. &#8220;It is the greatest scam in history,&#8221; he began. &#8220;I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming: It is a SCAM.&#8221;
What had set him off was a football game. The Eagles were playing the Cowboys in Philadelphia on Sunday Night Football, and as a gesture of environmental awareness&#8212;it was &#8220;Green is Universal&#8221; week at NBC-Universal&#8212;the studio lights were cut for portions of the pre-game and half-time shows. Coleman, who had been growing increasingly skeptical about global warming for more than a decade, finally snapped. &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t take it anymore,&#8221; he told me. &#8220;I did a Howard Beale.&#8221;
Skepticism is, of course, the core value of scientific inquiry. But the
that week, on the Web site ICECAP, would have more properly been termed rejectionism. Coleman wasn&#8217;t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research&#8212;something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, &#8220;look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.&#8221;
The Drudge Report picked up Coleman&#8217;s essay, and within days its author was a cause célèbre on right-wing talk radio and cable television, beaming into Glenn Beck&#8217;s TV show via satellite from the KUSI studios to elaborate on the scientists&#8217; conspiracy. &#8220;They all have an agenda,&#8221; Coleman told Beck, &#8220;an environmental and political agenda that said, &#8216;Let&#8217;s pile on here, we&#8217;re all going to make a lot of money, we&#8217;re going to get research grants, we&#8217;re going to get awards, we&#8217;re going to become famous.&#8217;&#8221;
Along with the appearances on Beck&#8217;s and Rush Limbaugh&#8217;s programs came speaking offers, and soon Coleman was on the conference circuit, a newly minted member of the loose-knit confederation of professional skeptics. (Coleman insists his views on climate change are apolitical, and says he has turned down offers to speak at Tea Parties and other conservative events.) His interviews and speeches that have been posted to YouTube have, in some cases, been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
None of it would have had much of an impact, but for Coleman&#8217;s résumé. For the many Americans who don&#8217;t understand the difference between weather&#8212;the short-term behavior of the atmosphere&#8212;and climate&#8212;the broader system in which weather happens&#8212;Coleman&#8217;s professional background made him a genuine authority on global warming. It was an impression that Coleman encouraged. Global warming &#8220;is not something you &#8216;believe in,&#8217;&#8221; he wrote in his essay. &#8220;I the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise.&#8221;
Except that it wasn&#8217;t. Coleman had spent half a century in the trenches of TV he had once been an accredited meteorologist, and remained a virtuoso forecaster. But his work was more a highly technical art than a science. His degree, received fifty years earlier at the University of Illinois, was in journalism. And then there was the fact that the research that Coleman was rejecting wasn&#8217;t &#8220;the science of meteorology&#8221; at all&#8212;it was the science of climatology, a field in which Coleman had spent no time whatsoever.
Coleman&#8217;s crusade caught the eye of Kris Wilson, an Emory University journalism lecturer and a former TV news director and weatherman himself, and Wilson got to wondering. He
a group of TV meteorologists, asking them to respond to Coleman&#8217;s claim that global warming was a scam. The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman&#8212;not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.*
Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century&#8212;half were sure this wasn&#8217;t true, and another quarter were &#8220;neutral&#8221; on the issue. &#8220;I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,&#8221; Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong.
In fact, anecdotal evidence of this disconnect had been accruing for several years. When a freakish snowstorm hit Las Vegas in December 2008, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, appearing on Lou Dobbs Tonight, used the occasion to expound on his own doubts about global warming. &#8220;You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,&#8221; he told Dobbs. &#8220;Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big.&#8221; Today&#8217;s most oft-quoted and influential skeptics include Joseph D&#8217;Aleo, The Weather Channel&#8217;s first director of meteorology, and Anthony Watts, a former Chico, California, TV meteorologist and prolific blogger who is leading a volunteer effort to document irregularities among the twelve hundred weather stations the National Weather Service maintains across the country (a concern that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration considers negligible, and in any case has factored into its calculations since the &#8217;90s). When Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, Congress&#8217;s most reliable opponent of climate-change legislation, presented a list of more than four hundred &#8220;science authorities&#8221; who disagreed with the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change in 2008, forty-four of them were TV weathercasters. And after the signature of Mike Fairbourne, the weatherman for Minneapolis&#8217;s CBS affiliate, turned up on a similar petition that year, reporters for the Minneapolis Star Tribune called around and found that hardly any of the city&#8217;s TV weathercasters believ one had recently called the idea &#8220;crazy&#8221; on a local talk-radio show.
More striking is the fact that the weathercasters became outspoken in their rejection of climate science right around the time the rest of the media began to abandon the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach that had dominated their coverage of the issue for years, and started to acknowledge that the preponderance of evidence lay with those who believed climate change was both real and man-made. If anything, that shift radicalized the weathermen. &#8220;I think the media is almost sleeping with the enemy,&#8221; one meteorologist told me. &#8220;The way it is now, there is just such a bias as to what gets out.&#8221;
Free-market think tanks like the Heartland Institute, knowing an opportunity when they see one, now woo weathercasters with invitations to skeptics&#8217; conferences. The National Science Foundation and the Congress-funded National Environmental Education Foundation, meanwhile, are pouring money into efforts to figure out where exactly the climate scientists lost the meteorologists, and how to win them back. The American Meteorological Society (AMS)&#8212;which formally endorsed the scientific consensus on climate change years ago, but counts many of the skeptics among its members, to its chagrin&#8212;has started including climate-change workshops for weathercasters in its conferences. For all of their differing agendas, the outfits have one thing in common: they have all realized that, however improbably, the future of climate-change policy in the United States rests to a not-insubstantial degree on the well-tailored shoulders of the local weatherman.
In the fall of 2008, researchers from George Mason and Yale universities conducted the most
to date about what Americans know and think about climate change. The short answer, unsurprisingly, was not very much. &#8220;Climate change is an incredibly complicated subject,&#8221; says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and one of the study&#8217;s co-authors. &#8220;Most people are not interested in digging through the scientific literature, and in that situation trust becomes an enormous factor. We rely on people and organizations to guide us through this incredibly complicated and risky landscape.&#8221;
That was where the survey&#8217;s findings got interesting. When asked whom they trusted for information about global warming, 66 percent of the respondents named television weather reporters. That was well above what the media as a whole got, and higher than the percentage who trusted Vice-President-turned-climate-activist Al Gore, either of the 2008 presidential nominees, religious leaders, or corporations. Scientists commanded greater credibility, but only 18 percent of Americans actually 99 percent, by contrast, own a television. &#8220;Meteorology benefits from the fact that we&#8217;re just about the only science that has an individual in people&#8217;s living rooms every night,&#8221; says Keith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society. &#8220;For many people, it&#8217;s the only scientist whose name they know.&#8221;
There is one little problem with this: most weathercasters are not really scientists. When Wilson surveyed a broader pool of weathercasters in an , barely half of them had a college degree in meteorology or another atmospheric science. Only 17 percent had received a graduate degree, effectively a prerequisite for an academic researcher in any scientific field.
This case of mistaken identity has been a source of tension throughout television&#8217;s sixty-odd-year history. When TVs began to proliferate in postwar American households, the first generation of weathercasters that viewers saw on them was mostly military men, recently discharged World War II veterans who had trained in meteorology in the Navy and the Army Air Corps. (Louis Allen, Washington, D.C.&#8217;s first TV weatherman, had drawn up the forecasts for the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.) But as broadcasting licenses multiplied and stations began to compete with each other in the &#8217;50s, meteorologist Robert Henson recounts in Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology (to be published this year), the Army men gave way to entertainers: scantily clad &#8220;weather girls&#8221; abounded, as did puppets, including one who divined the forecast with his handlebar mustache. A weatherman in Nashville read his forecast in verse. One New York station featured a &#8220;weather lion.&#8221;
After a few years of this sort of thing, the American Meteorological Societ the professional association&#8217;s membership, then comprised mostly of government and academic meteorologists, had grown wary of what the weather girls were doing to their reputation. The society devised a voluntary meteorological certification system, a seal of approval that TV weathercasters could obtain with the right academic background&#8212;at least a bachelor&#8217;s degree in meteorology&#8212;or demonstrated knowledge in the field. (This seal is what technically distinguishes a meteorologist from a weathercaster.) In a 1955 TV Guide article entitled &#8220;Weather is No Laughing Matter,&#8221; AMS member Francis Davis wrote that &#8220;If TV weathermen are going to pose as experts, we feel they should be experts.&#8221;
Although it took years, Davis&#8217;s view eventually won out. By the end of the &#8217;70s, weathercasters had begun to treat their responsibilities with some seriousness. They started to see themselves as everyman (they were still mostly men) scientists, authority figures who helped viewers not only anticipate once-unpredictable events, but also comprehend them. And when you think about it, the achievement weathercasters have pulled off as science educators is remarkable&#8212;ask anyone with a television to name some meteorological terms, and odds are they will be able to rattle off half a dozen: low pressure systems, wind shear, cumulonimbus clouds. Weathercasters are usually a sort of science ambassador to their communities as well, and spend as much time talking to elementary school classes and civic groups about science as they do forecasting on the air. The work hasn&#8217; heaps of
have identified the weather report as the most popular segment of the local news broadcast, and the biggest factor in viewers&#8217; choice of which newscast to watch. Even as Americans&#8217; trust in the media as a whole has cratered, love for the weatherman has persisted at levels unchanged since Walter Cronkite&#8217;s day.
The Clinton administration had all of this in mind in October 1997, when it gathered meteorologists from dozens of the nation&#8217;s biggest television markets at the White House for a special summit on climate change. In two months, negotiators would be meeting in Kyoto to renegotiate the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the talks that would ultimately produce the Kyoto Protocol. Americans were still largely uninformed about climate change, and the White House was hoping the weathercasters could help bring them up to speed. More than one hundred of them showed up to hear speeches from Gore&#8212;an early version of the slideshow later documented in An Inconvenient Truth&#8212;and President Bill Clinton, as well as leading NOAA climate researchers.
As the administration had hoped, the meteorologists used the occasion to opine about climate change&#8212;but what many of them said wasn&#8217;t quite what Al Gore had in mind. &#8220;There&#8217;s still a significant segment of the scientific community that&#8217;s not sold on this,&#8221; Harvey Leonard, then the weatherman at WHDH in Boston, told The Washington Post. Others loudly refused to attend the summit, including all but one of the weathercasters in the Oklahoma City market. &#8220;I&#8217;m not smart enough to know [if the earth is warming], and I don&#8217;t think any person on the planet is,&#8221; KOKH meteorologist Tim Ross told the Daily Oklahoman. The following month, twenty TV weather personalities added their names to the Leipzig Declaration, a petition opposing the global warming theory.
It was only a blip on the radar, but it presaged the broader rejection of climate science that would come a decade later. The question was, why? No doubt, some of the blame belonged to the White House. In positioning themselves as advocates for not only a policy position but also a scientific one, Clinton and Gore had conflated the political question of what to do about climate change&#8212;one that was, and remains, deeply partisan in the U.S.&#8212;with the apolitical question of whether it was happening. This put the weathermen in a tricky spot&#8212;embracing what was, even then, the majority position in the scientific community would make them look like shills for the administration. &#8220;Since the White House is behind it, it&#8217;s political,&#8221; Leonard told the Post. &#8220;I&#8217;m not a lap dog,&#8221; Gary England of KWTV in Oklahoma City&#8212;now a prominent climate skeptic&#8212;told the Daily Oklahoman. &#8220;I think Al Gore&#8217;s motives were pretty good&#8212;he saw early on the potential that these people had,&#8221; Kris Wilson says. &#8220;But he was probably the wrong spokesman. As journalists, we&#8217;re taught to be skeptical, right? We&#8217;re taught that if your mother says she loves you, get a second source.&#8221;
But the disagreement, then as now, also came down to the weathercasters themselves, and what they knew&#8212;or believed they knew. Meteorology has a deceptively close relationship with climatology: both disciplines study the same general subject, the behavior of the atmosphere, but they ask very different questions about it. Meteorologists live in the short term, the day-to-day forecast. It&#8217;s an incredibly hard thing to predict accurately, even with the
tiny discrepancies matter enormously, and can pile up quickly into giant errors. Given this level of uncertainty in their own work, meteorologist looking at long-range climate questions are predisposed to see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability. But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters&#8217; forecasts out of whack barely register at all.
This is the one explanation that everyone who has mulled the question seems to agree on&#8212;and indeed, when I spoke with meteorologists who were skeptical of or uncertain about the scientific consensus, it was the one thing they all brought up. &#8220;Meteorologists know our models,&#8221; Brian Neudorff, a meteorologist at WROC in Rochester, New York, told me. &#8220;There&#8217;s a lot of error and bias. We&#8217;ll use five different models and come back with five different things. So when we hear that climatological models are saying this, how accurate are they?&#8221;
But that hardly explains why so many meteorologists have disregarded the mountain of evidence of global warming that has already occurred&#8212;or why, in the case of the hard-line skeptics, they are so fixated on proving a few data sets&#8217; worth of tree-ring and ice core measurements wrong. &#8220;I think a lot of people have theories,&#8221; Robert Henson says, &#8220;but nobody knows for sure.&#8221;
In the absence of a clear answer, several institutions&#8212;the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research among them&#8212;have decided that education is the problem, and have launched projects aimed at teaching the weathercasters the basics of climatology. All proceed from the assumption that unreachable skeptics like Coleman are few and far between, and that most meteorologists are more uncertain than adamant, lost amid the Internet&#8217;s slurry of fact and counterfact. &#8220;While there is a group that seems to have made up their mind about climate change, there&#8217;s still a substantial portion that&#8217;s interested in learning more,&#8221; says Sara Espinoza, a program director at NEET. The AMS&#8212;which finds its credibility threatened by its televised emissaries a second time&#8212;is working with NEEF on a do-it-yourself climate science education package for meteorologists that points them to government data and peer-reviewed research. It is part of the AMS&#8217;s broader &#8220;station scientist&#8221; program, which aims to give meteorologists the tools they need to become the go-to authorities in their newsrooms on all scientific subjects, not just the weather. In essence, it is a doubling down on the wager that the AMS made fifty-five years ago: if viewers are going to assume weathercasters are experts anyway, we might as well try to make them experts.
It remains a laudable goal. But in my own conversations with skeptical meteorologists, I began to think that that earlier effort had helped create the problem in the first place. The AMS had succeeded in making many weathercasters into responsible authorities in their own wheelhouse, but somewhere along the way that narrow professional authority had been misconstrued as a sort of all-purpose scientific legitimacy. It had bolstered meteorologists&#8217; sense of their expertise outside of their own discipline, without necessarily improving the expertise itself. Most scientists are loath to speak to subjects outside of their own field, and with good reason&#8212;you wouldn&#8217;t expect a dentist to know much about, say, the geological strata of the Grand Canyon. But meteorologists, by virtue of typically being the only people with any science background at their stations, are under the opposite pressure&#8212;to be conversant in anything and everything scientific. This is a good thing if you see yourself as a science communicator, someone who sifts the good information from the bad&#8212;but it becomes a problem when you start to see scientific authority springing from your own haphazardly informed intuition, as many of the skeptic weathercasters do. Among the certified meteorologists Wilson surveyed in 2008, 79 percent considered it appropriate to educate their communities about climate change. Few of them, however, had taken the steps necessary to fully educate themselves about it. When asked which source of information on climate change they most trusted, 22 percent named the AMS. But the next most popular answer, with 16 percent, was &#8220;no one.&#8221; The third was &#8220;myself.&#8221;
The biggest difference I noticed between the meteorologists who rejected climate science and those who didn&#8217;t was not how much they knew about the subject, but how much they knew about how much they knew&#8212;how clearly they recognized the limits of their own training. Among those in the former category was Bob Breck, the AMS-certified chief meteorologist at Fox affiliate WVUE in New Orleans and a thirty-two-year veteran of the business. Breck rejected the notion of human-driven climate change wholesale&#8212;&#8220;I just find that [idea] to be quite arrogant,&#8221; he told me. Instead, when Breck talked to local schools and Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs about climate change, he presented his own ideas: warming trends were far more dependent on the water vapor in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, he told them, and the appearance of an uptick in global temperatures was the result of the declining number of weather stations in cold rural areas.
These theories were not only contradictory of each other, but had also been considered and rejected by climate researchers years ago. But Breck didn&#8217;t read m &#8220;the technical journals are controlled by the professors who run the various societies,&#8221; he told me, and those professors were hopelessly dependent on the &#8220;gravy train of grants from the NSF&#8221; that required them to propagate &#8220;alarmist theories.&#8221; When I mentioned the AMS, Breck bristled. &#8220;I don&#8217;t need the AMS seal&#8212;which I have,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I don&#8217;t need their endorsements. The only endorsements I need are my viewers, and they like what I do.&#8221;
As Breck went on, I began to get a sense of the enormity of the challenge at hand. Convincing someone he is an expert is one thing. Actually making him one&#8212;well, that is another thing entirely.
*Correction: The article originally stated that 29 percent of survey respondents agreed with the statement that gobal warming was &#8220;the greatest scam in history.&#8221; It has been changed to reflect the fact that the statement they agreed with was: &#8220;global warming is a scam.&#8221; We regret the error.
Charles Homans is an editor at Foreign Policy.
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