Waking up With Roker, Lemonick & 'Global Weirdness'

By Climate Central

Fans of Al Roker, or Climate Central, or both, take note! Michael Lemonick, a senior science writer for Climate Central, will be on The Weather Channel’s “Wake Up With Al” Wednesday morning between 6:30 and 7 a.m., and again on the show’s 8 to 8:30 a.m. half-hour.

The topic is Climate Central’s new book, Global Weirdness, which hits the shelves July 24. It’s a guide to what scientists know about our warming planet, how they know it, and what kind of disruptive changes they expect over the coming century.

Until a few years ago, Roker, the Today Show’s on-air meteorologist since 1996, wouldn’t have been able to say much about the relationship between climate and weather.  That’s because weather is what’s happening today or tomorrow or next week; climate unfolds over much longer time scales. In New York, where Roker has spent most of his career, the average daytime high in June is 79°. Some years are warmer than average, some cooler, but they bounce around that number.

Or they used to, anyway. Lately, the bounces have been mostly up, in New York and around the world. Record highs have become much more common than record lows, and the culprit is climate change.

It’s not just temperature, either: extreme weather events like droughts and heat waves are happening more often now than when Al (and Lemonick) were young, and once again, scientists have fingered climate change, caused in large part by human-generated greenhouse gases, as a major cause.

So if you want to find out what scientists really know about the climate, and how your weather is being affected, tune in.