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On 1 June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, an international accord that seeks to bring all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects. Many environmentalists, scientists, politicians, and others criticized President Trump's decision, one entity among that group of dissenters being the web site of the Weather Channel, which was altered in ways that clearly indicated disagreement with the President's announcement: This form of protest might have seemed all the more surprising given that the Weather Channel's co-founder has long disputed the concept of anthropogenic global warming. John Coleman, who passed away in January 2018, was a former television weather forecaster who worked in that field for over six decades, at a number of different TV stations across the U.S., until he suddenly retired from his last job at KUSI-TV in San Diego in April 2014. Coleman pioneered the use of such now-standard TV weather forecasting elements as onscreen satellite technology and computer graphics, and he was also instrumental in the founding of The Weather Channel (TWC) on cable television, serving as that channel's CEO and President during its establishment and its first year of operation. John Coleman also became, in later years, an outspoken critic of the global warming issue, stating that his epiphany came while he was viewing a football game in 2007: In November 2007 Coleman penned a widely-reproduced essay in which he labeled global warming the greatest scam in history and a manufactured crisis, and he delivered a speech in that same vein to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce in June 2008: Although this item is superficially true in the sense that the words quoted above were indeed written by John Coleman, the statement that they refute global warming (i.e., prove it to be false) is something of an exaggeration. As Coleman's critics have noted, he did not hold a degree in climatology or any related discipline, nor did he study or conduct any research in that field; he merely parroted arguments advanced by others: Moreover, much of Coleman's criticism of climate change dealt with impugning the motives of those engaged in that discipline rather than refuting the science behind their work: Critics of Coleman who do study and work in the field of climate science have produced detailed line-by-line rebuttals of his arguments against global warming.
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