… to know which way the wind blows. Maybe not, but a forecast worth the name can sometimes be useful.
It’s April. In April we have April Showers in the UK. This is not news. April showers are hard to predict – fair enough. Britain’s weather is hard to forecast because of its position on the planet – fair enough. What’s galling is
a) my own stupidity, after all these years, as I still look at weather forecasts for information that I then rely on and which then proves wrong, and
b) in most cases, the fact that these forecasts even exist.
Granted, they’re not all as culpable, but the majority of them present what’s little more than guess work as certainty, and present it with a confidence that still fools me – and any number of other people.
(I’m not even going to be begin to ponder the wisdom of all the expenditure on national weather forecasting when it seems it’s essentially a lost cause.)
If we accept that I’m not a complete fool, I guess there’s a lesson there about how anyone can be suckered if the person doing the suckering is convincing enough.
And then you see photos of the damage caused by the latest lethal tornadoes in the US and a soaking from an unexpectedly-early-in-the-day April thunder storm is placed firmly in an appropriate context.

No, that is not gloss black handlebar tape