Giant tabular icebergs are surrounded by ice floe drift in Vincennes Bay on January 11, 2008 in the Australian Antarctic Territory. | Getty The Weather Channel calls out Breitbart for climate change skepticism

The Weather Channel turned up the heat on Breitbart News on Tuesday, calling out the publication’s skepticism on climate change with a scorching rebuke.

The Weather Channel didn’t mince words, titling an article published Tuesday afternoon on weather.com: “Note to Breitbart: Earth Is Not Cooling, Climate Change Is Real and Please Stop Using Our Video to Mislead Americans.”


Breitbart last Wednesday published a report headlined: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” The story includes an embedded Weather Channel video.

“Global warming is not expected to end anytime soon, despite what Breitbart.com wrote in an article published last week,” the Weather Channel article begins. “Though we would prefer to focus on our usual coverage of weather and climate science, in this case we felt it important to add our two cents — especially because a video clip from weather.com (La Niña in Pacific Affects Weather in New England) was prominently featured at the top of the Breitbart article.”

The Weather Channel acknowledged Breitbart’s legal right to use the video but unequivocally stated that “there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it.”

The Weather Channel slammed the Breitbart report as “a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case,” highlighting the following sentence as an example: “The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare.”

“In fact,” The Weather Channel explains, “thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet’s climate and will keep doing so.”

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee shared the Breitbart report on its Twitter account Dec. 1. It has been retweeted 840 times, liked more than 1,100 times and drawn more than 5,300 replies.

Noting that Breitbart’s report “heavily references a piece that first appeared on U.K. Daily Mail’s site,” The Weather Channel concludes its article by debunking three claims, including the lead sentence, which states that “[g]lobal land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.”

“Finally, to our friends at Breitbart: The next time you write a climate change article and need fact checking help, please call,” The Weather Channel said. “We're here for you. I'm sure we both agree this topic is too important to get wrong.”