It’s a Conspiracy—The Weathermen

Turn on the television and tune in to some local channel at news time, especially during the winter—or the spring or summer or fall. Let’s just imagine what you might hear, between the live shot outside a courthouse where nothing has happened in hours and the vital health information regarding the importance of Upsilon-7 vitamins to the diet.
Here’s Stormy Raines with the weather.
Thanks Brice. Batten down the hatches tonight as we prepare for a real blast of winter. We’ll have all the details in just a moment.
This is when you endure the ad for a local car dealer who needs speech therapy and the announcement that local weather is brought to you by Kia. Finally Stormy reappears on the screen.
I hope you didn’t put away your winter coat and gloves yet. If you don’t need to go out tonight or tomorrow or the next day, then stay inside. Don’t even go near the windows. A vast, scary blast of winter coldness is moving this way. It’s big and it’s cold and there’s a good chance that we’re all going to die! Snowfall accumulations of nineteen to fifty-six inches are possible [in an alternate universe] with temperatures bottoming out in the low teens [in my freezer].
Fast forward twenty-four hours. Look out the window. Exactly seventeen flakes of snow are jockeying for position on your driveway, desperately seeking shade to avoid the mid-thirties temperatures and direct sunlight.
This is the story of television weather forecasts all around the country. They give us results like these:
· A forecast of extreme tornado activity yields winds too feeble to hold a kite aloft.
· A report of a killer heat wave leaves a skim of ice on the pond.
· A prediction of dimension-rupturing thunderstorms results in forty-five seconds of gentle rain.
Of course, in fairness, meteorology isn’t exactly a science—well, okay, I guess it is, but it’s not respectable like stock picking and phrenology. Still, we might expect a better track record than these people achieve.
Okay, okay, these people are predicting the future, so we should cut them some slack. They’re every bit as accurate as the experts who forecast professional football seasons—The New Orleans Saints will win the Super Bowl after the 2007 season—or political contests—Rudy Giuliani is the Republican’s most likely nominee for president in 2008. But if their misses were simply a symptom of the vagaries of winds aloft and Doppler misreadings, shouldn’t we expect Stormy and company to miss high just as often as they miss low, to overpredict the precipitation as often as they underpredict it? It makes sense doesn’t it? But this isn’t what we find.
After many seasons of painstaking research and record-keeping, I have uncovered a vast meteorological conspiracy. For every one case of underpredicting the weather, the “light dusting of snow” that turns into a blizzard, we get a dozen cases of overprediction.
But why, you might ask, would these meteorological mediocrities continuously exaggerate the future? What possible motivation could they have?
The answer here is simple. How far would they get with this forecast?
Stay tuned for weather when Stormy Raines will explain how nondescript tomorrow is likely to be.
Yeah, the “We’re All Gonna Die!” forecasts do not reflect meteorological uncertainties. They demonstrate the desire for ratings. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge the TV channels their ratings. Ratings are a fine thing. If a local weather personality fell in the forest and no one was tuned in to listen, would it make any sound? I don’t think so.
But can they justify the constant worst-case forecasts that we receive on the basis of a need for ratings? Not in my neighborhood.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan told us. As it turns out, if you listen the TV weathermen, you can count on hearing the wind blowing hard.