Meteorologists battle flood of misinformation as they report on Milton

“It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours,” Morales continued in a shaky voice, describing to viewers the power of what is likely to be the strongest hurricane to hit this part of Florida in more than a century.

“I apologize,” Morales later said of his show of emotion. “This is just horrific.”

On Wednesday morning, Hurricane Milton was closing in on Florida’s west coast. When it makes landfall, expected late Wednesday or early Thursday, Milton is forecast to pack peak winds of 145 mph and unleash a storm surge that could reach 10 to 15 feet. The hurricane comes as the state’s population has skyrocketed, with the Tampa region’s 3 million people in its path.

Several meteorologists and climate scientists told The Washington Post that they have spent decades warning about how climate change will lead to extreme weather events such as Milton. But the struggle to disseminate information in a fractured media environment has been worsened by an aggressive flood of misinformation, they say.

“This is by far the worst misinformation [for a] weather event I’ve ever seen in my career,” said Katie Nickolaou, a meteorologist with CBS affiliate WLNS in Lansing, Mich. “Because of Helene, you have so many people who now want to pretend to be experts or people who, as I put it, cosplay as meteorologists.”

Nickolaou said social media has become a hostile environment for scientists. On the meteorologist’s Facebook page Tuesday, a user “recommended murdering people to stop these hurricanes” — which Nickolaou understood as a reference to the conspiracy theory that the government or meteorologists are controlling hurricanes.

“I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Nickolaou said.

Morales, whose raw on-air moment went viral, said he is still absorbing some of the criticism he received after reporting on Hurricane Helene last month.

“Some people said that my forecasts for Helene’s devastation were exaggerated,” he said. “Others called me a climate militant, implying that I was embellishing all of the potential impacts from Helene to drive an agenda.”

Morales, founder of ClimaData, said it is challenging to warn people about extreme weather events when they believe so deeply in their own lived experiences.

“There is immense weight in thinking, ‘Well, I have lived here for 30 years and nothing like that has ever happened,’” he said. “It is human nature to think like that, but this mindset has cost a lot of lives over the years.”

He pointed out that Milton is not like other hurricanes. Its unusual angle of approach is contributing heavily to its potential for severe storm surge, he said. It is already one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin.

On Tuesday, the surge of misinformation led the White House to attempt a course correction on Reddit, a social media platform. The u/whitehouse username shared a photo of President Joe Biden holding a briefing on Hurricane Milton preparation and, in separate posts on the North Carolina and Georgia subreddits, shared details about the administration’s and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Helene.

“The White House will also ensure our information is shared on larger subreddits like r/politics, where we can correct misinformation,” a White House official said in a statement Tuesday.

Local and national experts are urging people to be careful about where they are getting their information about extreme weather events. They recommend staying away from social media and trusting the professionals at the National Hurricane Center and their messaging.

One frequent false claim Nickolaou described as dangerous is that Milton is a “Category 6” hurricane, when the scale tops out at Category 5. She worried that people seeing this claim won’t take future Category 5 hurricanes seriously enough.

Nickolaou said a peek into her group chats with others in her field would reveal “a lot of very tired meteorologists.”

“I’ve been messaging friends who I went to college with, who I’ve worked with previously in this industry, and we’re all just baffled by the amount of buffoonery happening on social media, which is a front that we didn’t have to deal with before,” she said.

Nickolaou sees a connection between misinformation about Milton and the anti-science attitudes that flourished as the coronavirus pandemic raged.

“The shift ties back to the perils of dealing with the pandemic, and that mistrust has now extended into other scientific fields,” she said. “This widespread belief is spreading that scientists don’t actually know what they’re talking about and that they’re hiding things.”

In recent decades, social media has enabled the instantaneous spread of misinformation, often from shadowy sources. Social media platforms also let users profit from creating posts with high engagement, which fosters an environment in which “engagement bait” can dwarf quality information.

Whatever the motivations for sowing climate misinformation now, environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben is unequivocal about where it all started: with the fossil fuel industry.

“The first thing to be said is that disinformation about climate change was not there from the start,” McKibben said. When he penned “The End of Nature,” his 1989 book, which is widely considered the first to address the human impact on climate change for a general audience, President George H.W. Bush famously spoke of fighting the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect.”

The Republican president saw climate change as a challenge to be solved by American innovation, but McKibben said Big Oil’s alignment with influential political donors such as the Koch brothers has continually fueled false narratives about sustainable energy alternatives to fossil fuels.

“It’s a long way from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis in May banning the phrase ‘climate change’ from Florida state statutes and saying, ‘I’m not a global warming person,’” McKibben said.

McKibben is hopeful that people’s minds can be changed — whether they are persuaded by the Pentagon or the pope or personal experience.

“Some people have just watched the forests near them burn or the rivers flood and they realize: The scientists were right,” he said.

Morales, the Miami meteorologist, said that while data shows that climate denialists make up only a small percentage of the U.S. population, their voice is very loud. He worries that those who believe in conspiracy theories are making themselves vulnerable to extreme weather by not taking the necessary precautions. He is also concerned about how the spread of misinformation makes it tougher for emergency management services to communicate their messages about how to protect lives and property.

Morales told The Post that he broke down on air on Monday because of a combination of “angst” over how extreme weather events are becoming more severe, his empathy toward people whose lives were about to be upended by the storm, and his frustration with the world’s inadequate response to the climate crisis.

“For over 20 years, we have been communicating on climate change, telling people that if we don’t do something about this, we are going to see more of these extreme weather events,” he said. “Now, it’s all too real. Here it is. Here today the climate crisis is on top of us.”