An Iowa meteorologist has started talking about climate change on the news. Then came the harassment.

DES MOINES, Iowa The harassment began to escalate as TV weatherman Chris Gloninger made multiple reports on climate change on local news, outraged emails and even threats to show up at his home.

Gloninger said he was recruited, in part, to shake things up at the Iowa station where he worked, but the backlash was growing. The man who sent him a series of threatening emails has been charged with third-degree harassment. The Des Moines station asked him to reduce its coverage, facing what he called understandable pressure to maintain ratings.

I started out by just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushbacks started to increase quite dramatically, he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Then, on June 21, the 38-year-old announced he was leaving KCCI-TV and his 18-year career in broadcast journalism altogether.

Gloninger’s experience is all too common among meteorologists across the country who are meeting with onlooker reactions as they link climate change to extreme temperatures, blizzards, tornadoes and flooding in their local weather reports. For on-air forecasters, the anti-science trend that has emerged in recent years exacerbates the media’s deepening skepticism.

Many forecasters say it’s a reflection of a more hostile political landscape that has also affected workers in a variety of jobs previously considered nonpartisan, including librarians, school board officials and election workers.

For several years now, Gloninger said, beliefs have been amplified more than truth and evidence-based science. And this is not a good situation to be in as a nation.

Gloninger’s announcement sent reverberations through a national conference of televised meteorologists in Phoenix, where many shared their own horror stories, recalled Brad Colman, president of the American Meteorological Society.

They say, you should have seen this ticket. And they try to take it with a smile, a lighthearted laugh, Colman said. But some of them are really scary.

Meteorologists have long been the target of abuse, but this has escalated in recent years, said Sean Sublette, a former television meteorologist and now chief meteorologist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

More than once, I’ve had people call me names or tell me I’m stupid or this kind of harassing stuff just for sharing information they didn’t want to hear,” she said.

A decade ago, far fewer television forecasters were talking about climate change on the air, even if they wanted to, said Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

The Weather Channel gave its first climate reporter, scientist Heidi Cullen, a dedicated show in 2006. She faced bitter and sexist resistance from some viewers, including conservative leaders, as she challenged other TV forecasters to tackle global warming in their relationships.

Climate Matters, a National Science Foundation-funded project piloted in 2010 and fully launched in 2012 to support climate change reporting by providing data analysis, graphs, and other reporting materials.

Now TV forecasters across the country are reporting on climate change, though Maibach said they don’t always use those words. It’s increasingly common to at least show its effects, she said, such as highlighting the trend of multiple days in a year reaching temperatures above 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius).

While this type of reporting resonates with most people, criticism can be the strongest.

If you stop reporting on relevant and important facts about what’s happening in your community because you’re listening to one in 10, that means you’re not serving the other nine out of 10, Maibach said.

Some forecasters have seen public interest in climate change grow even in largely red states, as floods, droughts and other severe weather devastate farmlands and homes. Jessica Hafner, chief meteorologist at KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Missouri, said that, with the exception of a few jammers, she’s seen people respond well to data-driven reports because they want to know what’s happening around them.

Meteorologist Matt Serwe, who used to work in Nebraska, said the livelihoods of farmers living there depend on the weather, so they take climate change seriously.

You want to know how you can best succeed with these conditions,” she said. Because at that point, the survival of her.

It’s not just a problem in the US. Meteorologists in Spain, France, Australia and the UK have also been subjected to complaints and harassment, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Some forecasters don’t see the harassment as a direct result of their reports on climate change; it is a pervasive problem in the industry and targets some more than others. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, broadcast journalists are more likely to report being harassed or threatened than journalists in other mediums.

The gap between Republican and Democrat confidence in both the scientific community and the media was the widest in nearly five decades of polling by the General Society Survey, a long-running trend poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. But trust in both has declined down the aisle in the past year.

Science is under attack in this country, said Chitra Kumar, managing director of climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It is this broader trend. It is truly unacceptable from our point of view that someone should fear for their life simply for stating the facts.

Gloninger is returning to Boston to care for aging parents, but says she will be leaving Des Moines having realized that a small percentage of people who reject climate change make up an overwhelming proportion of the negative comments she has received. The Des Moines Registry reported that Gloninger plans to join a company that studies climate change called the Woods Hole Group as a senior scientist in climate and risk communications.

I know now with the feedback I’ve gotten in retrospect, with hundreds of emails, dozens of handwritten letters, said messages that have come in from all over the state. KCCI-TV did not respond to a request for comment.

This incident is not representative of who Iowans are and what they believe, Gloninger added. At the end of the day, people have been incredibly supportive of not just me, but the efforts my station has been making to cover the weather.

Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas, and Ballentine from Columbia, Missouri.