The News and Observer from Raleigh, North Carolina • A4

4A SUNDAY AUGUST 2 2020News NEWSOBSERVER.COM AF to work effectively and professionally. To rehash it now, Fishel says, would only make things more difficult for his family, so like to let it be. His words today echo his official statement from 2019, citing personal challenges that got in the way of his work. had a number of personal issues which were resulting in me not doing my job up to the standard that I had held for myself for so many years, and it was starting to get in the Fishel said. it fair to the station and it really fair to me to try to juggle that and at the same time produce a quality product for them.

My work ethic did A POPULAR PRESENCE AND AN During time at WRAL, no one on Triangle television was more pop- ular. Each fall at the N.C. State Fair, fans would line up at the WRAL booth hundreds-deep just for his autograph. One year, the station passed out masks of his face, complete with eye holes and an elastic band. Everywhere you went at the fair that year, there he was.

His face was all over WRAL TV commercials, posters and billboards. In the years before he left, the station dubbed its weather report the Fishel The Pennsylvania native shared a kindred spirit with his Southern audi- ence, delighting in fore- casts that might possibly produce snow some- times visibly giddy as he ran through weather mod- els. Once, when his pre- diction for snow was wrong, he sat in the WRAL fountain, as he promised he would on-air, wet and shivering in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt in the middle of win- ter. He once did the entire weather forecast dressed as a mattress to help pro- mote an Athens Drive High School fundraising event. Fishel started at WRAL in 1981 after two years at WMDT in Salisbury, Maryland.

He became chief meteorol- ogist when another local weather icon, Bob DeBar- delaben, retired in 1989. Fishel says those early years at WRAL were diffi- cult for him. was an introvert and I did not like the public aspect of the he said. like being kidded about being paid to be wrong every day, and you know, I took it very per- But it turns out that the best cure was more of the poison. The longer he was on television and the more he was able to bond with his audience, the more he grew to appreciate the interaction.

TV industry ac- tually taught me how to be more of an he said. I felt like no matter where I went, to give a talk or to do a story or whatever it was, that I had friends out there, even though I never met In fact, those broken connections meeting and talking to people after public appearances are among the things Fishel misses most since leaving WRAL. got to the point that I actually looked forward to giving talks and inter- acting with people and having a he said. in later years there were a couple of topics that I felt very pas- sionate about. I actually looked forward to that and I miss that dearly.

I really, really do, because I done any of that since I A CHANGE OF OPINION ON CLIMATE CHANGE One of the topics Fishel frequently spoke on pub- licly in his later years at WRAL was climate change. Fishel, a conservative, made news in 2015 when he changed his opinions on climate change, telling a group of journalists and scientists at a climate change conference in Beaufort that year that he had been a core but that several years earlier he had decid- ed he had not been open- minded about the topic. His new view is that likely that humans are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere in ways that increase temper- atures. have we chosen to turn our back on sci- ence when it comes to basic chemistry and phys- Fishel wrote in a blog post following the confer- ence. is time to stop listening to the disin- genuous cherry-pickers and start taking responsi- bility for learning the truth about climate Gary Lackmann, a pro- fessor in the Department of Marine, Earth and At- mospheric Sciences in the College of Sciences at N.C.

State University, says Fishel remarka- ble and on the topic of cli- mate science. would go speak to conservative groups who probably want to hear him say that his views had changed, but when he would say that, I think he moved the needle (of opinion) in some of those Lackmann said. if a liberal Democrat were to go say that, those people would be less likely to listen. But when Greg, as a conserva- tive, was saying it, they respected and listened to him. I think he showed great courage getting up in front of those groups and telling them something that he knew they necessarily want to hear.

science should speak for itself and be independent of your politi- cal ideology, and Greg really embraced Lackmann said. also that science is not in- compatible with religion. You can believe in science and still be a deeply reli- gious and spiritual per- In fact, religion is very important to Fishel, and he sees an almost sym- biotic relationship be- tween religion and sci- ence. was the discov- ery of Fishel said. every time we discovered a new law or equation or princi- ple, we were unpeeling one more layer of the onion of knowledge.

science to me glori- fies creation be- cause it is so complex and it works so well most of the time. However, there are some people in my line of work in the science end that make me mad when they say believe in anything I and to me what they are saying is their level of intelligence is as good as it gets in the whole universe, and arrogant as INNOVATIONS Meteorologist Mike Moss, who retired from WRAL at the end of 2018, worked with Fishel for 25 years and credits him and the station with his entry into broadcast mete- orology. Moss was a wing weath- er officer stationed at Pope Air Force Base in the early 1980s when he no- ticed the big changes WRAL was making with the addition of Fishel, one of the first meteorologists with a degree at a Triangle station. Fishel and the newly formed WRAL Weather Center were part of the very first wave of TV sta- tions transitioning from having someone with a friendly face delivering the National Weather Service forecast to becom- ing something that was a lot more serious, Moss said. came here and started making in-house Moss said.

started getting the kind of data that a real meteorol- ogist Fishel pushed to get a Doppler radar at WRAL in the late and 10 years later, Moss said it was idea to get that upgraded to a dual polar- ization radar. of those were the first in the area and among the first in the Moss said. pushed for a lot of that, and of course you have to give a lot of credit to Capi- tol Broadcasting, bringing in great meteorologists and investing in the radar systems and modeling systems and display sys- tems we used during the But it just Fish- nerdy obsession with science that made him a great TV meteorologist, he was also a bit of a teacher to his audience. so good at that business of just communi- cating concepts and tidbits about Moss said. people have a real knack for teasing those things out and then translating it into some- thing people want to hear in a way really understand or at least think they NOT DUMBING THE WEATHER DOWN Lackmann, who has known Fishel for about 20 years, said Fishel often the in FROM PAGE 1A FISHEL SCOTT SHARPE WRAL meteorologist Greg Fishel works on computer graphics in the Weather Center at the WRAL studios in 1997.

SEE FISHEL, 5A.