Weather hype creates dilemma

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, March 2, 2007

This week’s schedule called for me to drive to southern Minnesota on Wednesday night in order to spend a couple days meeting with colleagues at newspapers there on Thursday and Friday.

Already Tuesday morning I was being warned to cancel the trip due to the big storm that was going to hit Minnesota.

I scoffed at that idea, because my experience is that winter storms — and summer storms, too — are invariably hyped into looming monsters, then fail to deliver.

So all day Tuesday I stuck to my travel guns, agreeing only that I would leave Wednesday afternoon rather than drive Wednesday night.

Then, Wednesday morning, subjected to another barrage of dire weather predictions I finally caved, called down south and canceled the trip.

If things were going to be all that terrible, I figured, no one would be getting any work done anyway and I’d have wasted a nine-hour round trip.

By Wednesday noon, I was seriously angry. Where was the storm? It was even sunny for a moment here in Fergus Falls, and in southern Minnesota nothing at all was happening.

I was so irritated that I printed the forecast from one web site and began making notes on the back about how wrong it was. If I could have easily rescheduled the meetings I had canceled, I would have been in the car headed south.

Instead, I fretted about wasted opportunities, complained when various Wednesday night events around town were canceled, and went to bed more than a little irritable.

So it was with some pleasure that I awoke to find it had actually snowed during the night. But what about southern Minnesota?

Early Thursday morning, still nothing happening. But by mid-day, that had all changed and they were closing interstates and sliding around like crazy.

OK, it turns out the forecasters nearly had it right this time.

There was indeed a some snow and wind, although nothing really remarkable here.

Further south, things got a bit nastier, because the slightly warmer temperatures left a layer of frozen rain underneath wet snow.

So as I write, I’m pleased to not be sliding around, wondering how — or if — I am going to get home.

But I am also wondering about the climate of weather worry that we have created. When every impending snowfall is forecast and pronounced as if it is going to be a terrible problem, it becomes exceedingly difficult to take any of them very seriously.

Media — including newspapers — make a living by reporting about what interests and excites people, and weather obviously does that. Forecasters, fearful that they will minimize a storm and that they will be blamed if someone then gets hurt, certainly have an incentive to play up every weather event.

It all adds up to way too much worry, hype and fear about the weather.

In our neck of the woods the latest big storm was really no more than a typical winter snowfall. Certainly, compared to what we experienced in the winter of 1996-97, it did not register high on the scale.

Did the weather we received really live up to all the hype? It doesn’t seem so to me. Instead, we got another dose of exaggeration that will only encourage us to ignore forecasts when they really matter.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.