“We were the founders, the pioneers, the group of people who had devoted our minds, our lives, our hearts, our souls...”
‘Weather Channel Pioneers’ is the entertaining ‘inside story’ behind what became one of the country’s favorite cable channel. The visionary was the late, great John Coleman who pioneered in the application of chromakey technology in local and network (Good Morning America) TV weather. John was frustrated by the weather show time limitations and the limited frequency of available TV weather. His dream was a 24x7 cable weather network.
This book captures for perpetuity the realization of that vision that became a shared vision of a large team of wonderful, courageous, and talented individuals. They were drawn from all corners of the country in many different disciplines to undertake something special and unprecedented. We like to call these unique people the “Weather Channel Pioneers”.
You will hear from many of us as we relate our experiences and anecdotes of a time like no other. It was a time when over 140 Pioneers, along with the idea makers, came together from all parts of the country to make a 24-7 cable weather network a reality. We were the Founders, the Pioneers, the group of people who had devoted our minds, our lives, our hearts, our souls and all the energy we had for the months or years that helped pave that long road to success. These are our stories and memories of that journey. We invite you to step back in time and experience what it was like to make that dream a success and imagine sharing this adventure.
Tom Skilling wrote this about the significance of TWC on his friend John Coleman’s passing.
“It was in a world which had never seen a weather channel---had no idea what such an entity would even look like---that John Coleman embarked on a mission which would occupy years of his life and end up revolutionizing the way meteorological information was communicated.”
Then Tom after reading responded:
Hi Joe-
I just had to write to tell you the book is amazing! What a tribute to John and what an amazing piece of work. As I read through it, all I could think about is about is the work you put into it. It shows! You have produced THE written record of one of the seminal advances in the field of meteorology--the creation of the Weather Channel. Your role in putting a staff for the channel was an achievement in and of itself. There was no model to follow, you broke new ground--and what a job you did.
That you to included me in this effort is an honor beyond words. THANK YOU, Joe “
“...and thanks for your continuing work at WeatherBell. I never read anything you do--from you Dr. Dewpoint days to your blog at WeatherBELL that I don’t learn something!! You continue to teach and educate.
All the very best to you, Joe! It’s been far too long since I last saw you.”
Warm regards,
Tom
Jim Cantore wrote: “Even though I didn’t start my TWC journey until 1986, I had no idea as a young man of 22 years what a wonderful opportunity I had been given to learn about life and meteorology from many of these TWC Pioneers. There are too many to name, but dozens of these men and women had a profound and lasting influence on the broadcaster I am today. What an incredible trip down memory lane revisiting the heart and soul of The Weather Channel as it was being born and as it became one of the most trusted brands in the world. These TWC pioneers didn’t just start a cable TV weather channel, they saved lives and created a mission of service which still resonates with millions of people to this day.”
Our early Art Director does this cover video intro:
See much more here about the book, a perfect Christmas gift for yourself or the weather savvy or weather lovers in the family.
Note see this rebuttal that global warming is causing wildfires here. See a rebuttal of 12 common alarmist claims here. See other detailed wildfire assessments here and here.
The winds are driven by extremely cold air in the Great Basin - not global warming. The cold, dense air flows through the western mountains passes and fans the flames of fires natural, made worse by radical enviro policies in the state.
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The Wall Street Journal published a superb article that exposes the government lunacy in California where its climate alarmist propaganda driven Democratic politicians have wasted tens of billions of dollars on energy schemes that are totally useless in having any meaningful impacts on global emissions levels while ignoring the statewide wildfire disaster that is destroying massive amounts of property, thousands of homes and taking hundreds of lives.
The article notes the following Democratic Party California government driven climate alarmist absurd climate actions being taken while ignoring the critical need for aggressive statewide highest priorities and resources commitments to addressing long standing failures by the state in addressing its forest management responsibilities.
“State law mandates that utilities obtain 33% of electric generation from renewables such as wind and solar by 2020 and 60% by 2030.”
Utilities must spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to reduce the cost of green energy for low-income households. PG&E has prioritized political obeisance over safety.
In 2018 PG&E spent $509 million on electric discounts for low-income customers in addition to $125 million for no-cost weatherization and efficiency upgrades for disadvantaged communities.
Utilities also receive allowances from the state’s cap-and-trade program - $7.5 billion since 2012 - to pay for other “ratepayer benefits” that reduce emissions.
For instance, the Legislature in 2015 mandated that utilities spend $100 million annually on solar systems in low-income communities.
This is on top of the $2.2 billion in customer rebates for rooftop solar installations, which utilities charged to ratepayers between 2007 and 2016. Under the state’s net-metering program, solar customers also get a break on their bills.
Last year PG&E invested more than $150 million in battery storage and “sustainable” technologies, which was paid for by a special charge on ratepayers. PG&E is also spending $130 million over three years to install 7,500 electric-car charging stations and offers drivers a $800 “clean fuel” rebate.
All of this has been part of a Democratic political strategy to use PG&E to advance their climate agenda without raising taxes.
But Californians have instead paid through higher electric rates - PG&E rates are twice as high as in Oregon and Washington - while utilities have had to redirect capital and ratepayer revenue away from fortifying the grid and tree-trimming.”
“PG&E has prioritized serving its political overlords above all else. California’s return to the dark ages is a direct result of the Democratic political monopoly in Sacramento.”
Democratic Party politicians in Sacramento have created this colossal wildfire debacle mess by their hugely misguided, monumentally incompetent and totally useless climate alarmist policy priorities wasting tens of billions of dollars on globally meaningless actions while ignoring the disastrous failures of the state to deal with its forest management responsibilities.
No doubt the states Democrats will hide their mind-boggling failures and try to shift blame and responsibility elsewhere most likely with the full support of the states corrupt media.
In a recent column, I addressed the icy cold reality that biofuel, wind and solar power would have monumental environmental impacts if they come anywhere close to meeting the needs of our modern industrialized American economy, healthcare system, and transportation and communication infrastructure.
This week’s article picks up where that one left off - and throws a few more buckets of icy cold reality on Green New Dealers who want to back up their intermittent, unreliable, weather-dependent industrialized wind and solar energy systems with massive battery arrays. It points out that green energy would require the greatest expansion in mining the world has ever seen - coupled with more of the despicable slave and child labor that extracts some of the critical minerals required for all those wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
More buckets of icy cold energy reality ”
Democrats, Green New Dealers and UN gabfest attendees need to get ‘woke’ on eco-energy
Paul Driessen
The full-court press is on for climate chaos disaster and renewable energy salvation. CNN recently hosted a seven-hour climate event for Democrat presidential aspirants. Every day brings more gloom-and-doom stories about absurd, often taxpayer-funded pseudo-scientific reports on yet another natural event or supposed calamity that alarmists insist is due to fossil fuels that provide 80% of US and global energy.
MSNBC just hosted another two-day Democrat presidential candidates climate forum at Georgetown University - where I spoke at a contrarian program. Meanwhile, a big Climate March took place in New York City, while protesters tried to block Washington, DC streets. They were all kicking off the UN’s “Global Climate Week” in NYC, featuring a Youth Climate Summit and UN General Assembly event where world leaders will demand “global action” to supposedly stop the supposed climate crisis.
Their standard solution is biofuel, solar, wind and battery power. My recent article dumped buckets of icy cold reality on several of those claims. They obviously need to be doused with a few more icy buckets.
To reiterate: Wind and sunshine are free, renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. However, the lands and raw materials required for technologies to harness this widely dispersed, intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not. In fact, their environmental impacts are monumental.
The Democrat candidates and their supporters want to replace coal and gas backup power plants with batteries, to ensure we have (much more expensive) electricity even when intermittent, weather-dependent wind and sunshine refuse to cooperate with our need for 24/7/365 power for our electricity-based homes, schools, hospitals, factories, businesses, computers, social media and civilization.
So let’s suppose we blanket the United States with enough industrial-scale wind and solar facilities to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours Americans used in 2018 - and we manufacture and install enough king-sized batteries to store sufficient electricity for seven straight windless or sunless days.
We would need something on the order of one billion 100-kilowatt-hour, 1,000-pound lithium and cobalt-based battery packs -similar to what Tesla uses in its electric vehicles. (This does not include the extra battery storage required to charge up the cars, trucks and buses we are supposed to replace with EVs.)
All these batteries would support the millions and millions of Green New Deal solar panels and wind turbines we would have to build and install. They would require prodigious amounts of iron, copper, rare earth metals, concrete and other raw materials. And every one of these batteries, turbines and panels would have to be replaced far more often than coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power plants.
Indeed, what are we going do with all those worn-out and broken-down turbines, panels and batteries? The International Renewable Energy Agency has said disposing of just the worn out solar panels that the UN wants erected around the world by 2050, under the Paris Climate Treaty’s solar energy goals, could result in two times the tonnage of the United States’ total plastic waste in 2017!
So another icy cold reality is this: All this “free, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly, ethical” energy would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has ever seen. But when was the last time any environmentalist or Democrat supported opening a single US mine? They detest mining.
Which brings us to the dirtiest pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable energy secret of all - the one these folks absolutely do not want to talk about: slave and child labor.
Because of rabid environmentalist opposition, the United States and Europe no longer permit much mining within their borders. They just import minerals - many of them from China and Russia. And the same groups that extol the virtues of wind, solar and battery power are equally opposed to Western mining companies extracting rare earth, lithium, cadmium, cobalt and other minerals almost anywhere on Planet Earth - even under rigorous Western labor, safety, environmental and reclamation rules.
That means those materials are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. They are dug out and processed by fathers, mothers and children - under horrific, unsafe, inhuman conditions that few of us can even imagine ... under almost nonexistent labor, wage, health, safety and pollution standards.
Those renewable energy, high-tech slaves get a few pennies or dollars a day - while risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. The mining and industrial areas become vast toxic wastelands, where nothing grows, and no people or wildlife can live.
For cobalt alone - say UNICEF and Amnesty International - over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away in mines, from sunrise to sundown, six or even seven days a week. That’s today. Imagine how many will be needed to serve the “ethical green energy utopia.”
Green New Dealers demand sustainable, ethical, human rights-based coffee, sneakers, T-shirts, handbags and diamonds. Absolutely no child labor, sweat shop, or toxic, polluted workplace conditions allowed. But they have little or nothing to say about the Chinese, Russian and other companies that run the horrid operations that provide their wind turbines, solar panels, smart grids - and batteries for their cell phones, Teslas, laptops and backup electrical power.
I’ve never seen them make ethical wind turbines, solar panels and batteries an issue. They’ve never protested outside a Chinese, Russian or Congolese embassy, or corporate headquarters in Beijing, Moscow or Kinshasa. They probably don’t want to get shot or sent to gulags.
And just a few weeks ago, California legislators voted down Assembly Bill 735. The bill simply said California would certify that “zero emission” electric vehicles sold in the state must be free of any materials or components that involve child labor. The issue is complicated, the legislators said. It would be too hard to enforce. It would imperil state climate goals. And besides, lots of other industries also use child labor ... they “explained.”
As Milton Friedman said, there is no free lunch. Wind, solar, biofuel and battery power are not free, clean, green, renewable or sustainable. America must not let delusion, dishonesty and ideology drive public policies that will determine our future jobs, prosperity, living standards, freedoms and civilization.
What Green New Dealers are talking about has nothing to do with stopping dangerous manmade climate change - or with real sustainability, resource conservation or environmental protection. It has everything to do with increasingly socialist, largely taxpayer-financed activists, politicians, regulators and crony capitalists controlling people’s lives; dictating our energy use, economic growth, job opportunities and living standards; and getting richer, more powerful and more privileged in the process.
Meanwhile poor, minority and working class families – pay the price. And destitute families in hungry, impoverished, electricity-deprived nations pay the highest price. China, India, Indonesia and Africa are not about to give up their determined efforts to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. They are not going to stop using fossil fuels to reach their goals.
They are not going to let anyone - including the UN, EU, US Democrats and other eco-imperialists - tell them they can never enjoy those blessings. Or they will be “allowed” to improve their health and living standards only at the margins, only to levels achievable with wind, solar and cow dung power.
That’s why, even as the United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 12% between 2000 and 2017 - India’s plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions soared by 140% and China’s skyrocketed 194% - further greening Planet Earth. In 2019 alone, China alone will add more coal-fired generating capacity than what all existing US coal-fired power plants generate.
While all these countries continue using more and more fossil fuels to improve their economies, health and living standards - why in heaven’s name would the United States want to join Green New Dealers and other crazies in an environment-destroying ban-fossil-fuels economic suicide pact?
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.