With the possible exception of Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, veteran TV weatherman Gary Lezak is the best-known and most loved personality in all of Kansas City.
For 30 years now, the openly gay Lezak has been predicting the weather on the city’s NBC affiliate, KSHB-TV, often accompanied by his celebrity dogs – Windy, Breezy, Stormy, and now Sunny.
So popular is Lezak locally that he must have thought he was above the rules. He must have forgotten that, on the subject of climate, he was not allowed to tell the truth.
“I think there are benefits to a warmer climate, more than if the Earth were turning colder,” Lezak tweeted earlier this week in response to a question about the climate. “I do not believe there is any emergency. It’s a very long term gradual process.”
As the Kansas City Star summed up the response, “Many people on Twitter expressed disappointment at the statement, noting that the climate crisis has direct impacts on the local weather events Lezak covers in depth.”
Disappointment? Here is what Chuck Grape had to say about Lezak, a very public survivor of a rare form of cancer. “That’s odd. He listens to scientists when it comes to cancer.”
Tweeted Chris Ollig, a biology teacher, “Oh Gary! We’ve loved you for years but this is REALLY not ok. So much about this is wrong, backwards, and downright dangerous. Very disappointed to hear this from you.”
“Gonna be following Mike Thompson into politics,” tweeted Ian, still apparently troubled that another local TV personality came out as a Republican and got elected state rep in Kansas. The Star clarified that Thompson “has a history of claiming that global warming is not a serious threat being caused by human activity.”
Other tweets were more succinct: “No Gary noooooooooooo.” “Wait, what?!? Oh Gary.” “I like him. I did anyways. His tweet is disturbing.”
And this: “Wow. Thanks for sharing – this person obviously requires some education.” With a meteorology degree and 30-plus years of experience, Lezak doesn’t need “education.” He needs what Marxists have long had a talent for, namely “reeducation.”
Stung by the sharp response, Lezak did what public figures feel compelled to do when assaulted by our homegrown red guard. He recanted – or at least seemed to.
“I want to thank all the folks who responded to my response on Twitter to a climate question,” he tweeted a day later. “Thought it would be good to provide some clarification. I do take climate change VERY seriously. Climate change is, without question, a serious problem.”
The Star article by young Natalie Wallington on Lezak’s public humiliation unsubtly morphed into an editorial. She did not question the alleged “consensus” about climate change or the mob mentality dictating policy.
No, Wallington asked rhetorically whether meteorologists “have a responsibility to connect broader weather patterns to global warming.” For her, the answer was an obvious yes.
“As extreme weather events worsen around the globe,” she writes, “many forecasters are shouldering this new responsibility.” In Wallington’s world, looming climate catastrophe is a given.
Curiously, on the same day the social media mob had him don his dunce cap, Lezak did connect local weather to larger trends, posting an article on his weather blog headlined, “Weather Blog: It’s been 1,049 days since Kansas City area’s last tornado watch, streak may continue.”
A year ago, even the Washington Post conceded that the U.S. has endured something of a tornado drought, headlining an article, “For a record 8 years, the U.S. has avoided the most destructive kind of tornado.” In 2017, the Post published an article about “the U.S.’s strange hurricane ‘drought.'” Apparently, “extreme weather events worsen” only elsewhere.
The author of the Post hurricane article was one-time woke wunderkind Chris Mooney. In 2007, Mooney wrote the highly imaginative bestseller, “The Republican War on Science.” He followed that up with a book about hurricanes called “Storm World,” a book whose alarmist thesis was subverted by the subsequent hurricane drought. He has had a lot of explaining to do since then.
Before Mooney’s star dimmed, a local college invited me to debate Mooney on, among other subjects, “global warming.” That was what activists called their scam before a “warming hiatus” rendered the label a bit awkward.
Only after the debate began began did I realize how rare it must be for people like Mooney to be challenged on anything. In explaining my skepticism, I stuck to the easily graspable, starting with the historic record of the medieval and Roman warmings. This information seemed to come as news to Mooney.
Flailing, he countered that the thermometer had been invented only 150 years ago. I suggested that the Vikings did not need to look at a thermometer when naming their newly found island “Greenland.”
I then talked about the settlements in Greenland, the vineyards that stretched into Northern England, the town names, the historical artifacts, the memoirs and the various core samples that suggest these warming events were not local. Mooney appeared to know none of this.
In retrospect, it is easy to see why Mooney was so clueless. Debate is all but verbotten in woke weather circles. The Star article on Lezak made this clear.
A fan girl of the Sunrise Movement, a self-declared “youth movement to stop climate change” – yes, “stop” – Wallington asked its spokesperson for an official comment on Lezak’s statement.
Said the group’s Raymond Forstater, “We aren’t in the business of debating climate deniers.” No, like all good fascists, Sunrise activists are in the business of shaming dissenters, silencing them and, if need be, “reeducating” them.
“We are the climate revolution,” they tell us, and, as history reminds us, revolutions always rely on “useful idiots” in the media like Wallington.
See www.cashill.com for more about Jack Cashill.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
