I, like many other people, enjoy a good snow day. As a teacher, I enjoy being startled awake by an early morning phone call that says school is cancelled. I love having the opportunity to go back to sleep for an extra couple of hours, hang out in my sweats all day and just look out the window at the wonderful wintry white stuff. I like driving around in the late afternoon hours and going to stores and restaurants that are only scarcely filled with those people who were brave enough to drive through the marshmallowy mounds of mayhem. I also love the anticipation…the waiting… the sitting up the night before the beloved snow day searching the skies for that one solitary snowflake that marks the beginning of the storm. This feeling though, this anticipation, it begins with one single person—the meteorologist. And after many storms that never came, and disappointing snowdays that never occurred I have come to one conclusion.
Meteorology is a joke. It’s not real. No one can really predict the weather. I bet when people go to college to learn about meteorology, the professor just closes the door, draws the shades and says, “Look, you have just entered the greatest major ever created. We guess, lie and deceive people for a living. But keep your mouths shut, people think that there’s really some serious science going on here.” For four years, they just learn a bunch of terms like Il Nino and La Nina, cold front, warm front, barometric pressure, highs, and lows. You know why they learn these terms, huh? So they have something to blame their poor weather predictions on, “Well that’s part of the problem with an Il Nino system, it’s so unpredictable.” Unpredictable….Unpredictable…if it’s so damn unpredictable then why don’t you just be honest with us and say “I Don’t know!”
Then these meteorologists learn how to speak about these terms and draw confusing diagrams on maps that none of us are meant to understand. Naturally, we don’t know what they’re talking about. And to tell you the truth, neither do they.
“So why are all weather reports the same or similar?” you ask.
Easy they all work together to create one master weather plan that makes you think they all know what the hell they’re talking about. Then if anything other than what they predict occurs all they have to say is “Global warming… or aberrant high pressure system, or a shift in the jet stream or the classic..this goes against all of our computer models.
This is not how weather people should be determining future weather patterns you say. Instead, they should use some advanced technology, you say. Like what…DOPPLER RADAR? No, it’s a farce. There is no such thing as a Doppler radar. Have you ever really seen one before? Think about, it’s not real.
Let’s face it the best any weather person can really tell you is the tempreture but not in Farenheit, Kelvin or Celsius, no because they can’t even get that right. Meteorologists need to just stick to the basics: winter cold-- summer hot – spring and fall in between.
You really want to know the weather is? Stick your head out a window because honestly it’s better than anything any trained meteorologist will ever tell you.
