John Coleman (meteorologist)

For other uses, see John Coleman (disambiguation).

John Coleman
John Coleman, KUSI News Weathercaster
Born	John Coleman (1934-10-15) October 15, 1934 Alpine, Texas
Status	Married
Occupation	Weather Forecaster
Spouse	Linda Coleman

John Coleman is an American TV weatherman noted, along with entrepreneur Frank Batten, for founding The Weather Channel. He presently works as an on-camera weather caster at KUSI-TV in San Diego but is no longer affiliated with The Weather Channel.

Professional career

Coleman started his career at WCIA in Champaign, Illinois, doing the early evening weather cast and a local bandstand show called At The Hop while he was a student at University of Illinois. After receiving his journalism degree in 1957, he became the weather anchor for WCIA's sister station WMBD-TV in Peoria, Illinois. Coleman was also a weather anchor for KETV in Omaha, WISN-TV in Milwaukee and then WBBM-TV and WLS-TV in Chicago.

Eyewitness News team, 1972. Back, from left: anchor John Drury, anchor Joel Daly. Front, from left: weatherman John Coleman, anchor Fahey Flynn, sportscaster Bill Frink.

At WLS, Coleman was teamed with Fahey Flynn, Joel Daly and Bill Frink to form the Eyewitness News team, creating a news brand name and establishing a highly successful new local news format derisively dubbed "happy talk" by a local television columnist. This style of local news has been widely copied. The team dominated Chicago television news ratings for more than a decade. During his time at Chicago's WLS-TV, Coleman was one of Chicago's most popular weathercasters, famous for his amusing and irreverent style. It was then that Coleman became the original weathercaster on what was then the brand-new ABC network morning program, Good Morning America. He stayed seven years with this top-rated program anchored by David Hartman and Joan Lunden.

In 1981, he persuaded communications entrepreneur Frank Batten to help establish The Weather Channel, serving as TWC's CEO and President during the start-up and its first year of operation. After leaving TWC, Coleman became weather anchor at WCBS-TV in New York and then at WMAQ-TV in Chicago, before moving to Southern California to join the independent television station, KUSI-TV in San Diego, in what Coleman fondly calls, "his retirement job."

Views on global warming

In the fall of 2007, he described the wave of concern about global warming "a fictional, manufactured crisis, and a total scam". In 2008, Coleman gave a speech of the same tone, before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, blaming the "global warming scam" and environmentalist lobby, for rising gas and food prices. He also declared the scam "a threat to our economy and our civilization." Coleman has shared his global warming views on made appearances on CNN, [Fox News Channel] and on the Showtime program, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and dozens of radio talk programs across the nation. Coleman has published a series of articles explaining how the global warming scare developed. In one article entitled "The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam", he presents the idea that many scientists and politicians have been embroiled in fraudulent activity based on bad science in a continuing quest for funding, and with environmental and political motives including a campaign to establish a one-world government. Coleman says the genesis of the post [World War II] global warming movement was the early research of scientist Roger Revelle at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was Revelle who introduced the concept of global warming to student Al Gore at Harvard University in a population studies glass. Coleman says Revelle's early research also became the cornerstone of the work of a United Nations bureaucrat Maurice Strong who used it to found the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). While Revelle later cautioned his research was not conclusive, Gore and the United Nations IPCC continued the global warming/Climate change campaign and U.S. Government funded global warming research now exceeds 2.7 billion dollars a year. In January, 2010, Coleman produced a special report for [KUSI-TV], entitled Global Warming: The Other Side, in which he forwards his view on Global Warming as a scam—and lays out what he believes to be evidence of a deliberate manipulation of world temperature data by U. S. Commerce Department's National Climate Data Center and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science in the United States and the Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia in England. Coleman critics point out he has no education in the field of climate change. But he responds that he was a professional member of American Meteorological Society for many years and was the recipient of the AMS Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year award in 1982. He stands firm on his credibility on the topic saying, "I have been forecasting the weather on a daily basis for fifty years and have studied weather and climate daily for the entire period. While I am not qualified to do Climate research, I am a highly qualified professional in the field." .

Personal life

Coleman was born in 1934 in Alpine, Texas, the fifth child of a college professor and his math teacher wife, Claude and Hazel Coleman. He is married to Linda Coleman, and lives in a retirement community in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Bernardo.

External links

• John Coleman at IMDb
• Coleman's Corner at KUSI