Special Weather Briefing:
How Do You Still Keep Your Job?
“How many times can you be wrong and still keep your job?”
It is a question that I ponder as I sit here at the breakfast table in mid-May, in California, clad in flannel shirt and flannel lounge pants, with wool socks on my feet. This attire, even in Placer County, is not “normal” for this time of year in California. Yesterday, I wore shorts, sleeveless polo shirt and bare feet. Today it is 50 degrees F (at most) with clouds and clouds (marine layer 100 miles inland) and wind. “They” say it might get to 63 today, which is Tuesday.
I doubt it.
The forecast was for 94 degrees F by Friday. The meteorologists are wrong.
Again.
The accuracy of the profession of meteorology has plummeted, in inverse proportion, to the number of computer models, gadgets, advanced degrees and the sheer number of “climatologists” who have flooded this field of simply following the movements of clouds and wind across the Fruited Plain and elsewhere in the world, ‘round and ‘round this, our Only Planet. Maybe they need a new planet.
I mean, how much expertise is required to look out the window and see that it is cloudy and about to rain? The forecast that day is sunny and hot!
“Climate change,” my flannel-clad foot. How about the centuries-long reality that the weather swings from one extreme to the other? Everywhere! And They can’t figure it out!
The incompetence factor is augmented by the fact that most of these “meteorologists” work in windowless rooms, thousands of miles away from the region to which they must provide digital guesswork as to the temperature and overall degree of wetness or dryness. Most of them have never been to California, aside from “LA” and I wager to say they would be shocked, shocked (!) to learn that the weather, such as it truly is, varies from one region of this state to another.
California is one big image blob, sprawled over the map and in the minds of people East of the Mississippi, and, yes, The Weather People all live East of the Mississippi.
Shortly after I first moved to California, I was telling an adolescent relative in the East about my job. He asked with genuine incredulity, “You mean you work?”
Yes, I work. I do not lounge by the pool, watching the crack in the concrete from the latest earthquake slowly extend the fault line into where I recline on the lounge chair!
I offer this quote from Anton Chekhov, a statement he wrote in one of his many many letters. The excuse for this pitiful Russian government employee at the time was overwork and likely inebriation to the point of mental incompetence. There really are no such excuses for the Meteorologists in America, although I posit the theory that they will attempt these excuses!
“ . . . the poor old Court Investigator is so far gone that a sick bedbug would have no trouble evading his dim gaze, let alone a murderer.”
I’d planned quite a different program today, one that included sun and “seasonable weather,” temps in the 70s? The forecast remains clear and dry, even though it is now well past noon and, as I look out MY windows, I see the effects of the wind — since we do not truly see the wind, and evidently the meteorologists never see it or its effects. The effects of the wind moving water vapor just might bring . . . visible moisture . . . precipitation!
Even though it’s not forecast, and especially since it’s not forecast, I think: Yes, it might rain today in California! Again. The past 3 forecasts were also completely botched or mangled in some form to a reduced number of wet days or degree of wetness. When “chance of scattered showers” during one week in April became furious downpours (with intermittent hail the size of golf balls and thunder and lightning) all day and night, I figured They figured wrong! Again.
Maybe the Meteorologists might consider looking up from their soft Windows of weather modeling to look out of the hard window of Reality and update their (latest) version of just what is going on in the world, at least in the weather world. For a real meteorological change, try looking out of an actual window!
The Irish are very superstitious about weather; they believe that if you complain about it, it will get worse. Being Scots-Irish, I have no such fear! I do not complain, however, about the weather but about the people who make their living from predicting it. The crap table of weather fronts just came crashing down today on not only my poor allergy-stuffed sinus but, in my sentient mind, on an entire hyped-up industry that bought into junk science and now it is overpriced garbage with flashing ads.
Late this afternoon, while I listened to the monotonous sound of the raindrops yet again on my rooftop, I looked online, not to find yet another wrong weather forecast, but to buy a divining rod! I can’t always count on the throbbing of my right index toe, the toe that two decades ago broke because a void in it snapped when I kicked my husband. Needless to say, it hurt me more than it hurt him!
I still do not know how these incompetents keep their jobs!