BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP) — It’s hard to find a more trusted name in the state of Alabama than James Spann. If the meteorologist were to run for governor today, no one would bother challenging him.

And yet, he has experienced the daggers that come from misinformation. A longtime children’s ministry volunteer, speaking the truth has been a cornerstone of his 47-year career. At times, and more recently, it has made him a target.

Spann’s desire to expand responsible weather reporting gets a boost next Monday with the launch of The Alabama Weather Network. It will never be off the air, operating on various streaming services and social media alongside an app and its website.

Spann will serve as the chief meteorologist of the network’s six-member team. “Serious” planning began about two years ago, he told Baptist Press, with equal coverage throughout the state a key motivator.

“Many old school television stations always cover larger cities but often go back to regular linear programming when severe storms get ‘out in the country,’” he said. “That is not my style, and we will fix this problem across the entire state. Every part of Alabama will be treated the same.”

Predicting the weather is difficult, and mistakes happen, “but when severe storms are in progress, you have to work extremely hard, with integrity and a servant’s heart, to be successful. We promise to be live if any part of Alabama is under a tornado warning. That is a very important promise. And if you break it one time, your promise doesn’t mean much.

“Integrity is a big deal.”

That places him at a disadvantage when bad weather reporting moves at the speed of social media.

“The bogus information … is extremely harmful,” he said. “People have canceled beach trips, even elective surgery, because they saw that a ‘big hurricane was coming’ on Facebook.

“This horse is out of the barn and there is nothing we can do about it except to encourage people to find a credible source. You can reach Facebook or TikTok any summer day and find rogue Facebook pages posting 384-hour deterministic model output showing a hurricane that will never happen. And those posts get thousands and thousands of likes and shares.”

Online misinformation became such an issue that Spann was directly accused of being complicit in the Texas flash flooding last month that claimed at least 138 lives, many of them children. The meteorologist spoke on The Rick Burgess Show to address the danger of those lies.

“What is horrifying to me (is that) some of these precious parents who lost their precious children … are going to open up Facebook or whatever and… see the most horrific nonsense from political extremists,” he said.

That comes from both sides, he stressed, with some saying budget cuts reduced National Weather Service staff and others blaming “chemtrails” sprayed by the government.

In the mid-1990s, a conspiracy theory developed over contrails from airplane exhaust that form into ice crystals at high altitudes. The resulting theory was that these were actually chemicals — thus the name chemtrails — sprayed for reasons such as population control and weather manipulation. The reasoning grew out of the real practice of cloud seeding, acknowledged by governments and weather services worldwide, that began in the 1940s. It is used to affect rain- or snowfall in small amounts but is incapable of generating storms and conditions that led to the Texas floods.

The reality is that weather conditions left the atmosphere in the days preceding the floods “like a wet sponge waiting on something to squeeze it,” which led to the high rain rates, Spann said. Weather staff was in place. The warnings worked the way they should have.

Spann told Baptist Press that he received several messages from Christians claiming he was part of actions that led to the Texas flood deaths.

“Some of the most serious threats I receive now come from people with Bible verses and their church affiliation smeared across their Facebook profile,” he said. “Some of these are death threats.”

Such behavior by church members, obviously, would prevent others from visiting.

“Some church folks believe I was part of a group that killed the girls at the Texas camp by creating and controlling the flood down the river there. We ‘did it’ to punish Texas because they voted for Trump. This is the world we live in now.”

Spann was also critical of those in his industry who dispense alarmist messaging on TV or issue an overload of warnings. It’s a classic “crying wolf” scenario, he said, that leads viewers to disregard warnings for when they are in the path of a storm and facing legitimate harm.

“An inch of water on a country road, that’s not a flash flood,” he said. “We need to have a sit-down, come-to-Jesus meeting about these false alarms, and I think this will help initiate that discussion within the professional weather enterprise and TV stations.” 

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Scott Barkley is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press.)