El Nino, humidex, and vortex madness
“Good evening. Coming up tonight on the evening news. President Trump withdraws the United Sates from NATO. Korea tests a new missile capable of reaching every major capital in the world. And another outbreak of swine flue threatens to kill thousands in downtown Toronto. But first, the weather.”
Okay, I’m exaggerating, but really, when did the weather become the lead story instead of merely an added note at the end of the daily broadcast? Canadians in general have always been a little weather obsessed and given the extremes of our climate, from the bitter cold of February to the swelter of August, it’s understandable. The fact that we were also, until relatively recently, a largely agrarian society, didn’t help.
Farmers have always been keen weather watchers simply because their lives and livelihood revolve around knowing when to plant, when to water, and how much time they have to harvest. Keeping an eye out for everything from possible hail storms to the occasional tornado, to say nothing of flooding or drought, is inbred. This is also likely why you never hear a farmer say silly things like, “Gee August was a lovely month” or “We had just enough rain last year.” It’s either too much or too little whether it’s rain, sun, wind or cloud.
Today, that general Canadian interest and daily topic of conversation that once was the weather has become a major national concern eliciting daily Jeremiah-like prophesies of woe and warning. Not a day goes by without a smiling television meteorologist pointing out that the low pressure system now off the coast of Florida, as insignificant as it might appear, could become the next hurricane Katrina. And the tale of climatic destruction isn’t confined to our own backyard either. We are treated daily, often in gruesome detail, to mother nature wreaking havoc throughout the globe. No disaster goes uncovered. No calamity unreported.
Part of the blame here lies with the advent of 24-hour news programming. Networks quickly realized that there just isn’t enough going on around the globe to fill 24 hours of air time. Thus we are treated to the same stories every hour of the day with just enough of an update to pretend that interviewing the local sheriff at the sight of a shooting in an Alabama convenience store, for the seventeenth time, qualifies as breaking news.
This is where the weather comes in. One of the few things that changes hour by hour and place by place is the weather. Thus the news anchor can offer insightful commentary such as, “This just in. Meteorologist have now calculated that Hurricane Angela’s winds have now jumped from 105 kilometres per hour to 106.”
Unfortunately, even the weather doesn’t change fast enough or drastically enough to capture that elusive audience that CNN, MSNBC, CBC News Network, BBC World News and CTV News Channel are all fighting for. The solution? Every meteorological event no mater how small or how insignificant has to be jazzed up. A hot spell becomes a deadly heat wave. A flash flood morphs into a major disaster. A sink hole is tied to everything from natural gas fracking to potential methane poisoning.
No longer are we content to listen to the news and then find out whether it will be a good day for a picnic the following day, or whether we should probably get up an hour early to clean the snow off the car, nothing will suffice but the weather man, sorry, make that meteorologist, explains in minute detail exactly why it is going to be hot or cold.
We hear all about El Nino and his sister El Nina as they dance across the southern pacific. The cold front expected is now part of a “polar vortex” that will likely freeze us in our homes. Not only do temperatures soar but the “humidex,” like some lurking animal, will add five degrees to our suffering. The weather is no longer something we have to deal with every day, it is something to be feared.
My advice? Stick your head out the window first thing in the morning, take a look and go from there.