Paul’s Perilous Prognostications

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The question was posed to me today by a recovering Internet weather service subscriber, who has just canceled his subscription:

“what a year this has been! I wonder what this means for the winter. JB probably thinks big snow storms are on the way!”

To which I replied:

Glaciers led by al queda coming down the hudson, was the quote I heard from DT-Risk on the easternWx forums… I’m sure they have it as doom and gloom, that’s what sells papers (or Internet subscriptions)…

And he replied with:

The future is always ominous according to JB…I don’t think that his extended outlook ever said that there is no potential for storms…even in the quietest of times.

Which kind of set me off, I had just finished a discussion with someone about the weather and how one of the local TV weather morons was a moron

Exactly, is anyone going to pay if the long term winter forecast is for a mild winter with average temps, and normal snow fall??? Then when the doom and gloom doesn’t show up, they’ll start picking out the isolated freak stuff that always happens, but only affects one zipcode, and say how they were the first to pick up on that in their long range forecast…

CrapuWX used to be a really good service, and carried a lot of pull with the commodities markets. Now a lot the firms large and small have their own meteo(s) on staff, partly because of CrapuWX rates increasing and the accuracy decreasing, and by having their own staff they could focus on the exact market they are in… Corn, Wheat, Oil, pork Bellies… This is also one of the reasons the the commercial firms like CrapuWX are supporting SB786, restricting the data especially NCEP data, would make there service more attractive to commercial(big) customers, and what they do for the public is pure profit…

Just think do you ever hear on those 11pm news teasers during prime time TV, everything’s fine, and we’ll show you how good things are at 11, in fact everything is so good you don’t even need to stay up… Nope it is always doom and gloom, and it is always made to sound like it is a local event… When usually it is a localized event hundreds if not thousands of miles away that will have a near zero impact on the viewers lives, except to cause some level of panic and to cause them to watch that station that night…

A perfect example IRAQ, have you seen any positive coverage of the war in IRAQ or Afghanistan… They don’t cover the fact that girls are going to school for the first time in 30 years in Afghanistan, not that 90%+ of the people in those countries are happy with the changes. I know a lot of people that have been there and they tell me that the media has it all wrong…

You are being told what the people that control the media want you to hear… Perfect example… When gas prices were rising due to Katrina, CNBC’s Squawk Box show was talking about all the local media at the gas station across from their office covering the long lines… What they also brought up was the gas station 5 blocks away had gas at they same price and no lines, as they said the simple fact was that the station across the street always had 10+ cars in line, 6 months before Katrina they had lines for gas it is on a main road and its easy to get to, the is the local news (fear mongers) knew that there were going to be lines there…

I don’t have a problem lurking in the background writing code, making all this work, and generally debating Dave on this and that, but Dave has been on me for the last couple of weeks about posting my own column of stuff…
To that I say be careful what you ask for…