[tomohawk]

We see a lot more weather hype in the news than we used to. Winter storms have names. We get "arctic vortexes". And normal summer temps are flogged as a massive heat wave.

Someone in the biz was telling me that the reason is that many 'news' orgs would rather have an article about the weather than about a lot of other subjects, so they've steadily increased the number of weather related coverage.

[frankbreetz]

Also extreme weather events are increasing in both quantity and severity. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/...

[atoav]

Well that and the increase of frequency of once-in-a-century weather extremes. And it will get more.

It takes the same amount of energy to melt 1L of ice as it takes to heat 1L of water up to 80 degree celsius. This means currently we have massive amounts of energy beeing absorbed by the melting ice. After that, we will see. Breakdown of the Jetstream? Gulf stream? who knows.

[untog]

...also, climate change is leading to an increase in extreme weather events. Feels a little unfair to blame the media for clickbait hype when this is a heatwave.

I'd always heard that news organisations love weather stories because they're cheap to produce and readers want to read them and find them useful. There's a reason the morning news has a weather update every fifteen minutes, after all.

[maxander]

It serves a purpose, though, since weather is more relevant to day-to-day experience than most news stories. E.g., Boston is going to hit just about 100F this Saturday; that’s enough to potentially hurt someone not expecting it, and there’s probably people who wouldn’t hear about a heatwave if it wasn’t in something like the NYT.