Paul Douglas - Caring for Creation: The Evangelicals Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment

An Unlikely Cause

The trouble with weather forecasting is that its right too often for us to ignore itand wrong too often for us to rely on it.

Patrick Young

Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.

Psalm 25:5

Paul, what s going on with the weather? As a TV meteorologist, I get that question a lot these days. As time goes by it gets harder to answer.

How is the weather where you live? Is it what you remember growing up? No? Its not your imagination. Our weather is a hot mess. Its almost as if Mother Nature picked up a remote control, put the seasons on fast-forward, and dialed extreme weather up to a 10.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s it was increasingly freakish weathernot Al Gorethat tipped me off that something had changed. Patterns were shifting. Something was off.

I didnt set out to talk about climate change. It wasnt on my radar. I was just doing my job, tracking daily weather, attempting to connect the dots and make sense of the atmosphere. Like many TV meteorologists, I had been traumatized by weather at a tender age. Tropical Storm Agnes flooded my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in June of 1972. It put the fear of God into meand made me want to study severe storms. I graduated with a meteorology degree from Penn State, where I provided weekend weather for a TV station in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Pennsylvania. The station set up a backyard weather set, appropriately called The Backyard. The news director took me out back, pointed, and said, Paul, if youre standing outside, at least youll get the current weather right. Great vote of confidence. I went on to work TV meteorology jobs in Connecticut, Chicago, and the Twin Cities, which is where my wife and I raised two amazing boys and I launched a series of weather technology companies on the side. Ive always had an entrepreneurial itch, an urge to tinker and invent.

One of my earliest companies, EarthWatch, brought 3-D weather graphics to TV stations in the early nineties. Steven Spielberg used our special effects for Jurassic Park and Twister . I actually have a line in Twister , pointing to Doppler radar as a monster F-5 tornado is just starting to spin up. Hey, Bryce, you better come here and take a look at this! If you sneeze or blink, youll miss my big scene. My last residual check from Warner Brothers? One cent. So much for my film career.

Another business, Digital Cyclone, put Doppler radar on cell phones in 2001it was one of the first companies to put an app on a mobile device. I sold that business to Garmin in 2007 to focus on personalizing the weather. Since 2010, AerisWeather has built TV studios, hired meteorologists, and launched two national weather channels. Today we personalize weather for businesses and consumers, leveraging new technologies that bring the story down to an audience of one. We brief Fortune 500 companies on global weather risks and threats, helping weather-sensitive companies operate more efficiently, profitably, and safely with desktop and mobile applications. I have risked my money for things I believe in. Ive sweated out payroll. Ive failed, regrouped, and reinvented. I am an entrepreneurand I believe the power of markets can help transform our world for the better.