“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”—Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)
Hey Bob, sometimes the weatherman has trouble knowing which way the wind blows!
How else to explain this past weekend in my neck of the woods, when Northern New Jerseyites such as myself were warned sternly by newscasters to batten down the hatches—only to see some areas pummeled, while others (such as mine!) emerged with barely a flake (except the human variety that already existed in force anyway)? In some cases, as a guy standing in a foot of snow said on the Weather Channel on Saturday, “It’s only a matter of miles” between hours of backbreaking shoveling and being home free.
You’d think, after all these years, that weather personnel would figure all this out. After all, on this date in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law an act establishing the U.S. Weather Bureau (renamed a century later by what it goes by now, the National Weather Service).
For once, Congress got it right, instructing the Secretary of War, in its original Joint Congressional Resolution, “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms."
There it is, present at the creation, the agency’s reason for being: predicting storms. Only over the years, they’ve had a little bit of a hard time with that.
Weathermen, see, have all kinds of contingencies linked to their forecasts. If the cold front from Canada meets the cold front from Ohio…if the hot air from the Gulf Stream meets that nor’easterer…if temperatures drop to 32 degrees when that Midwest storm hits the Mid-Atlantic…
If…If…If….What’s with all the ifs? What am I, listening to a Rudyard Kipling poem or something?
Actually, no. All the ifs serve a rational purpose: the continued gainful employment of people who study a “science” in college but, for all their unaccountable lack of success at predicting sun vs. rain, might have been better off sticking to alchemy, the subject that Sir Isaac Newton pursued in secret for decades. (With good reason: ever since biographers ferreted out this hobby, modern scientists have continually asked: What was he, nuts?)
Invariably, because of all those “ifs,” we’ll hear something about a “50% chance of a blizzard.” That kind of a dodge, meteorologists think, enables them to preserve their aura of scientific credibility.
But I’m afraid that all it does is create a lot of meteorological agnostics—people who, after one too many watch-that-blizzard or watch-that-hurricane prediction that doesn’t come true, even adopt a skeptical attitude.
People, that is, like the New Yorker I heard on the radio this morning who, when told of the latest Major Meteorological Event coming our way, enunciated the frustrations of many: “They said it was gonna be a blizzard the other day, and there ain’t no blizzard.”
And this is for 24-to-48-hour forecasts. Five-day forecasts, under these circumstances, become positively laughable. I bet that more than a few of the irate consumers of weather information are global-warming skeptics, too.
(Me, I don’t know—like 99% of adult Americans, I never studied meteorology in college. I don’t pretend to know if we’re on the Road to Climate Perdition. But isn’t it better not to take a chance with Mother Nature?)
Local TV newscasts have been wise for years about the growing orneriness of viewers. Their marketing professionals have been cluing them in that, rather than see some high-forehead, high-IQ guy getting people seriously ticked off about a storm that’s will alter plans for the weekend, viewers would much rather watch someone with a –pardon me!—sunny disposition, just in case the worst doesn't happen.
In other words, a lot of guys sitting in front of their TV sets won’t mind being had so long as some eye candy is involved. A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down, as the song goes.
Hey Bob, sometimes the weatherman has trouble knowing which way the wind blows!
How else to explain this past weekend in my neck of the woods, when Northern New Jerseyites such as myself were warned sternly by newscasters to batten down the hatches—only to see some areas pummeled, while others (such as mine!) emerged with barely a flake (except the human variety that already existed in force anyway)? In some cases, as a guy standing in a foot of snow said on the Weather Channel on Saturday, “It’s only a matter of miles” between hours of backbreaking shoveling and being home free.
You’d think, after all these years, that weather personnel would figure all this out. After all, on this date in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law an act establishing the U.S. Weather Bureau (renamed a century later by what it goes by now, the National Weather Service).
For once, Congress got it right, instructing the Secretary of War, in its original Joint Congressional Resolution, “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms."
There it is, present at the creation, the agency’s reason for being: predicting storms. Only over the years, they’ve had a little bit of a hard time with that.
Weathermen, see, have all kinds of contingencies linked to their forecasts. If the cold front from Canada meets the cold front from Ohio…if the hot air from the Gulf Stream meets that nor’easterer…if temperatures drop to 32 degrees when that Midwest storm hits the Mid-Atlantic…
If…If…If….What’s with all the ifs? What am I, listening to a Rudyard Kipling poem or something?
Actually, no. All the ifs serve a rational purpose: the continued gainful employment of people who study a “science” in college but, for all their unaccountable lack of success at predicting sun vs. rain, might have been better off sticking to alchemy, the subject that Sir Isaac Newton pursued in secret for decades. (With good reason: ever since biographers ferreted out this hobby, modern scientists have continually asked: What was he, nuts?)
Invariably, because of all those “ifs,” we’ll hear something about a “50% chance of a blizzard.” That kind of a dodge, meteorologists think, enables them to preserve their aura of scientific credibility.
But I’m afraid that all it does is create a lot of meteorological agnostics—people who, after one too many watch-that-blizzard or watch-that-hurricane prediction that doesn’t come true, even adopt a skeptical attitude.
People, that is, like the New Yorker I heard on the radio this morning who, when told of the latest Major Meteorological Event coming our way, enunciated the frustrations of many: “They said it was gonna be a blizzard the other day, and there ain’t no blizzard.”
And this is for 24-to-48-hour forecasts. Five-day forecasts, under these circumstances, become positively laughable. I bet that more than a few of the irate consumers of weather information are global-warming skeptics, too.
(Me, I don’t know—like 99% of adult Americans, I never studied meteorology in college. I don’t pretend to know if we’re on the Road to Climate Perdition. But isn’t it better not to take a chance with Mother Nature?)
Local TV newscasts have been wise for years about the growing orneriness of viewers. Their marketing professionals have been cluing them in that, rather than see some high-forehead, high-IQ guy getting people seriously ticked off about a storm that’s will alter plans for the weekend, viewers would much rather watch someone with a –pardon me!—sunny disposition, just in case the worst doesn't happen.
In other words, a lot of guys sitting in front of their TV sets won’t mind being had so long as some eye candy is involved. A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down, as the song goes.
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