The chatter started to kick into high gear yesterday afternoon as news emerged that the first big snow event of the season was barrelling down on our fair community. The local snow tracking weather prognosticators searched mightily to find the perfect expression to Chicken Little the shit out of this fairly typical weather event. Would we get a Snowmageddon, or a Snowpocalypse? Would a snow bomb explode in our midst, leaving us all crying snow mas? To me, it felt more like a Snownami because Lake Michigan was about to deposit some of her contents at our doorstep in the form of lake effect flurries.
Soon, word got around that a bit of a dust up was breaking out on social media. Apparently, some members of the local populace were questioning the official narrative coming from the crack team of meteorologists at one of the local television affiliates. The pile on became so severe that an off-duty weather person had to come to the rescue and defend the credibility of her colleague. It seems even our once sacred weather institutions are no longer immune to a populist revolt.
We ended up getting a good, solid blanketing of snow, resulting in barely any disruption to our daily routines. Some areas further north got more than a blanket, maybe something approximating a thick, cozy comforter of snow. No epic blizzards or snow globe cyclones.
I get the impulse to catastrophize the shit out of everything. Nobody wants to be caught unprepared, and the catastrophizers want to be able to say we warned you, if all hell breaks loose. But far from being less informed or misinformed, people are actually better informed these days, and they’re not going to listen to experts and prognosticators tell them one thing when the truth is something clearly different. In weather reporting, it’s mostly not a big deal, but in other areas it can contribute to less than optimal outcomes. Maybe telling people the sober, boring and occasionally inconvenient truth is where it’s at.
If there is something 