University of Washington Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, and well known global warming skeptic Cliff Mass has been terminated from his part time weather discussions on KNKX in Seattle.
But it wasn’t his web site rants against the ‘establishment’ science community and how they have bought into climate change without all the facts. No, he apparently went after the recent protesters in no uncertain terms. This was sent to KNKX supporters today.
At KNKX, we value high-quality, factual information in our news programming and we aim to present an array of voices that reflect our region.
We turn to our regular commentators for their expertise and points-of-view when it comes to sports, food and the weather. But if a commentator, even on his own independent platform, delivers rhetoric that is offensive and inaccurate, we cannot support it.
This is the case today with Cliff Mass. His post on his personal blog compares recent events in Seattle to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom carried out by Nazi Germany and draws distorted, offensive parallels between protesters and Nazi Brownshirts. We abhor the comparison and find it sensationalized and misleading—it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX.
The segment Weather with Cliff Mass will no longer air on KNKX.
Sincerely,
Joey Cohn
General Manager
This is the second time he has been ousted from a radio job. In 2011 he was kicked off KUOW, as reported in the Seattle Times,
Mass said the station was particularly peeved over his occasional forays into math education and the controversy over which textbooks to use in local schools. But the final straw came last month, when Mass weighed in to defend and clarify UW’s admission policies after The Seattle Times reported some straight-A local students were being rejected in favor of higher-paying out-of-state applicants.
I was somewhat surprised then when KNKX decided to pick him up. It showed poor judgement on their part.
I’m just surprised that it took this diatribe for KNKX to oust him, rather than one where he challenged that we are not in a crisis situation with global warming. This one he can’t explain away. Let’s be clear, there are a lot of other regional weather meteorologists that can be of as much help as Cliff has been. I have followed Cliff for many years, and even discussed his lack of support for climate change/global warming issues on his blog once. He is the darling of the global warming skeptics crowd.
Goodbye Cliff, you have done your bit to tell people that we are not in any danger of global warming, as the forests of Siberia burn with temperatures 20 degrees over normal, and Paradise is now a real place known to have burned to the ground rather than a mythical nirvana. You have done your damage, and now it’s caught up to you. Bye.