This is the season when weather gets interesting: first the hurricanes, then the winter storms. The unpredictable cruelty of the weather led our ancestors to assume that it was sent by capricious gods to torment us mere mortals, or perhaps just for their own celestial entertainment. This theory has persisted for thousands of years, and it makes perfect sense to me. Weather forecasting, in spite of satellites, super-computers and sophisticated modeling techniques, remains almost as fallible as stock market forecasting. The weather will do what it will do. Spring turns suddenly into high summer, and a delightful autumn snaps brutally into winter. It makes no difference whether it was forecast or not.
Weather is infinitely variable, like life itself. We want to predict it and to understand it, but it always takes us by surprise. On the other hand, weather is just about the only thing we think we can predict at all. So those fanciful forecasts occupy a disproportionate amount of time on TV and radio news programs, and often delivered with operatic exaggeration, as if they were real news. Then life goes on as before – warm or cold, wet or dry, as the case may be. What have we learned? Nothing.
There are three distinct types of weather. The first is what might be called social weather, the universal topic of conversation. Mark Twain complained that “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That is precisely why weather is such a reassuring subject, because we can’t do anything about it. It is fate. Sometimes I call friends in Europe and we invariably talk about the weather there, and the weather here. We enjoy these conversations, and hang up the phone with the feeling that we have exchanged important information. The weather on the south coast of England is wet and cold. The weather on the north shore of Long Island is warm and wet. It’s something we can share.
The second type of weather is what I call public relations or fantasy weather. You find it in tourist brochures, glossy magazine articles, and guidebooks. This weather is always splendid, and it’s all lies. Every traveler knows this. Promoters of tourist destinations never tell the truth about their weather. When you get to their tropical paradise in the middle of a snowstorm they always claim, without much conviction: “This is very unusual.”
Thirdly we have weather as drama and entertainment. This is where the hurricanes and storms come in. For serious weather junkies there's the Weather Channel, which offers a steady diet of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other extreme weather events, usually affecting unfortunate people who live a long way away.
But sometimes fate catches up with us and dramatic weather arrives right here where we live, so it’s hard to ignore it. Are we all doomed, or just some of us? There’s not much we can do about extreme weather except to stock up with cat food, candles, and long Victorian novels. But at least, for years into the future, it will give us something interesting to talk about.
Copyright: David Bouchier
