Imagine living in a world where you send your children to school in the morning on a relatively mild day. It gets a little colder, the winds pick up and it starts to snow. A lot. With wind. And lots more snow. Nbd, right? Send the kiddos with their eskimo suits, water-proof uggs and have some hot chocolate ready when they get home.
Except in 1888, they DIDN'T KNOW the storm was coming. And over 200 kids died.
There are droves of spiritual metaphors to be derived here, I'm sure. But for the moment, I'm grateful that we knew a hurricane was coming last year (and the year before) and that we know a decent snowstorm is coming tomorrow. So we can send the kids with coats.
(the commercialization and shock factor of weather reporting is the subject for another post on another day, but I suspect it's producing a sort of boy-cries-wolf with the "snowmageddon" "snor'eastercane" "winter storm draco""you-better-cancel-school-tomorrow-because-we're-getting-two-inches-of-snow-oh-and-by-the-way-stop-by-our-website-so-it-will-get-another-couple-hundred-thousand-hits-and-drive-up-our-click-through-rates" forecasters... probably not the best consequence)
I'll let you know what the real world result of shock-and-awe weather forecasting is this time. (Since we've only gotten snow a couple times since we've moved here, more than an inch of the stuff merits photo documentation.)
P.S. to all the moms out there: we have our battery powered radio ready to go...just in case.
This may interest you. It's a talk at the conference I'm going to next week.
ReplyDeletehttp://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/webprogram/Paper10516.html