Everybody makes mistakes. No one is perfect. All of
us have missed the mark from time to time. But Good Lord, what in the world has
gotten into the weather forecasters in Richmond, Virginia?
There’s this guy who works out of his basement in
Chesterfield who seems to have started a meteorological cat fight amongst the
profession of late. As far as I can tell, this guy made his bones from one
forecast ten years ago where he called for a huge snowstorm a couple of weeks
before it happened and instantly developed something like a cult following. He has
a web site and a presence on Facebook from which he routinely trashes all of
the local TV weathermen, calling them every name in the book for having the
audacity to disagree with his forecasts.
Well now, after his initial prescient call way back
when, he has turned into the proverbial stopped clock of forecasting…worthless
99% of the time but right twice a day regardless. Practically every one of his
big predictions ends up being a bust, and yet I don’t believe I’ve ever heard
anything approaching an apology from him when the local TV guys he constantly
rips end up being much more accurate. It has become a fascinating spectacle to
watch him make some outlandish outlier forecast, then start calling his
competitors names. Ultimately, more often than not he ends up making an unprofessional,
boorish fool of himself. And yet, he still remains in the business, meteorology
obviously being the kind of business where accuracy is neither required nor
expected.
Now that I think about it, the weather forecasting
gig is an awful lot like politics. Apparently, being consistently wrong is not
a career killer. John Kerry can spend his whole life being wrong about every
foreign policy question this country has faced over the last fifty years and
what happens? He becomes Secretary of State.
So, if the past is
prologue, the mean little dude from Chesterfield will probably end up running NOAA
before long.
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