An Experiment in Scotch

Appar­ently, the peo­ple in charge of such things in the US Gov­ern­ment are pre­dict­ing a hur­ri­cane sea­son with more than the aver­age storms. Which of course is ridicu­lous since the sci­ence (if it could pos­si­bly be called that) is so inex­act as to be silly. They also pre­dicted a busier than usual sea­son last year and you know where that got us (or if you don’t, you can prob­a­bly fig­ure out that if you don’t remem­ber it, it prob­a­bly wasn’t that bad).

The way I fig­ure it, since 2005 (Kat­rina and Rita) hur­ri­cane fore­cast­ers have no choice in pre­dict­ing the upcom­ing sea­son as busy because if they don’t, they’ll look like idiots. When they pre­dict a busy sea­son and it doesn’t hap­pen (see last year), every­one for­gets. This way, they cover their asses and if the pre­dic­tion turns out right, they can be vindicated.

Key graf:

The year-to-year swings, experts say, show how dif­fi­cult it can be to pre­dict hur­ri­cane activity.

Really?  Then why in the name of all that is holy are we both­er­ing to announce this stuff?  Oh yeah, because sen­sa­tion­al­ism in news sells these days.  As for me, I’m all for a busy hur­ri­cane sea­son, it might mean more sum­mer rain for my gar­den and I fig­ure peo­ple who moved back to New Orleans after Kat­rina prob­a­bly need another les­son from God or Gaia or who­ever regard­ing where it is and is not ok to live.  A large bowl between a big lake and a big­ger ocean typ­i­cally doesn’t qualify.