Meteorologists Hit For "Causing" Climate Change

“Murderers.” “Criminals.” “We are watching you.” These are just a handful of the threats and abuse sent to meteorologists at AEMET, Spain’s national weather agency, in recent months.

Photo Insert: Abuse and harassment “have always happened” against AEMET, Spain’s national weather agency's scientists.

They come via social media, its website, letters, phone calls – even in the form of graffiti sprayed across one of its buildings, Laura Paddison reported for CNN.

Abuse and harassment “have always happened” against the agency’s scientists, Estrella Gutiérrez-Marco, spokesperson for AEMET, told CNN. But there has been a rapid rise recently, coinciding with extreme weather in Spain.

Météo France, the French national meteorological service, said it has been targeted for repeated attacks. In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been slammed for reporting temperature records, with critics saying it was making climate change seem worse.

BOM said these claims were inaccurate.

Social media has become a refuge for the ignorant climate change twaddle of Donald Trump, who wants to nuke hurricanes and claims windmills cause cancer, and Elon Musk, who is the godfather of Twitter disinformation.

In UK, meteorologists reported intense online harassment during last year’s record-breaking heat wave, which led to the first-ever “red warning” for heat.

“As scientists communicated this information, they were accused of instigating a nanny state hysteria,” Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, told CNN. US meteorologists and climate communicators have not escaped the barrage of abuse and conspiracies.

“Whenever I posted about global topics, like the yearly temperature report, the comments section would be filled with political jabs and conspiracy theories,” said Elisa Raffa, a broadcast meteorologist with Queen City News in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, said she’s seen a surge in abuse lately. “I receive almost daily verbal declarations of my ignorance and climate alarmism,” she told CNN.

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