"Under the Weather"

 

Documenting the Dreariness
   I have been feeling unwell and also assisting someone who is really unwell. For those reasons I have not posted anything for over two weeks and don't feel much like doing so even now. But, I will, since I happened upon an article which lessens the effort required to think about a subject about which to write. As well, I will likely quote from it to reduce the amount of writing I actually have to do.
   I thought that not feeling very good probably led me to think that the weather also has not been very good. That the sky was as cloudy and congested as my sinuses and lungs. An X-ray revealed that my lungs were as full of moisture as the clouds, which seem to have been hanging around for weeks. They have been.
   That my physical state was in sync with the meteorological one is proved by this article for which this is the headline: "It Was the Darkest Winter in 80 Years: Ontario Endured 'Exceptionally Low' Sunlight in January." Here is more about the gloomy picture outside our windows:

"Though Ontario had "unremarkable" levels of sunlight in December, it was in January when the province experienced "exceptionally low" amounts of solar energy, Brettschneider said. It was followed by a February season which also had lower-than-normal levels of sunlight.

Looking back at the weather in Toronto this season, the city experienced 14 consecutive days in late January without the sun appearing, according to David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada. Earlier in the season, between Dec. 30 and Jan. 13, there was only one day that was described as mainly clear."

 
   It is typical that here in Ontario it has been just 'dreary' and not as exciting and sensational as it has been elsewhere where there are "Bomb Cyclones", "Atmospheric Rivers and "Polar Vortexes." I can report, however, that we did have one evening of "Thundersnow", which means that we had both thunder and lightning while the snow was falling. It is, by the way, very dreary here again today.

The Bonus:

   There is a "Brettschneider" quoted in the article above and he has been noticed in MM before. Back in 2018 his data were used to define what it means to "Have A Nice Day." If you would like to know what 'nice days' are and where some can be found, have a look at that post.

Sources: 

   "It Was the Darkest Winter in 80 Years... was written by Joshua Chong and found in The Toronto Star, March 18, 2023.

   Only the truth is found in MM and no hyperbole encountered. Weather reporting these days does often contain a lot of hot air and that is noted in this piece:

"Bomb Cyclone? Or Just Windy With a Chance of Hyperbole?: When the Barometer Drops, the Volume of 'Hyped Words' Rises, and Many Meteorologists Are Not Happy About It," Matt Richtel, New York Times, Jan. 18, 2023. 

  Also noted on the U.S. major TV networks are the now nightly 'breaking news' meteorological horror stories involving millions of people directly in the path of something awful. That some of these stories may be more ratings-driven than weather-related is touched upon in this post: "The Human Suffering Index.

  

The Wind Chill

 

   The autumn equinox is upon us and we are losing about three minutes of daylight per day. There is less daylight and there will be lower temperatures. Soon, as we watch the 6 o'clock news in the dark, we will be warned about the "Wind Chill." It is much worse than the temperature, which is why we are being warned. Invitations to local outings will be accompanied by reminders to wear mittens and appropriate footwear. I suppose such warnings are issued not because we are stupid, but because the inviters want to be spared a law suit should we be bitten by the frost, or because we might have forgotten about the Wind Chill.

   Meteorologists have largely abandoned the thermometer and the temperature in favour of the expression "It's going to feel like....!!!" . As in other realms of our experience, I suppose,  feeling is more important than thinking.  The season of the Humidex has passed and there was rarely a pleasant summer day that was not described as "Horrific" because of it. Winter is bad enough, but it will be made much worse by the Wind Chill. I guess it could be even worse if there was also some kind of a "Light Index" and we warned that on the dreary day to come the weather person will say that "Tomorrow afternoon at 1, it is going to feel like midnight." 

   I may be a contrarian, but I am not alone on this issue. Back in March, the veteran science journalist, Tom Spears,  had this to say about both the "Wind Chill" and the "Humidex." The source: "The Weather: Opinion: Why Are We Inflating Our Weather Forecasts? The Scam That is the Wind Chill." Toronto Star, March 7, 2021.

On the Wind Chill:

"We have a problem with our weather.
It’s being reshaped by an inflationary force that is pushing out hard data — and replacing it with squishy approximations of “how cold it feels.”
This problem is a simple thing we hear about all the time: wind chill....But the wind chill still made the day feel colder than the actual temperature. At least, that’s the official story.

But why does every winter day have to be described as colder than it really is? Listen to the radio and count how often the announcer says: “ … but it’s going to feel like …” Increasingly I’m even hearing wind chill given more prominence than the actual temperature. I hear neighbours and people in shops talking about the terrible cold, -20 or -25 C, when the temperature is -15 C or so.

The effect of this is inflation. No matter what the temperature is, we keep telling ourselves it feels colder. And the deck is stacked to promote cold. First, the wind chill calculation doesn’t consider any warming influences, such as the sun that warms your face at this time of year. Touch a brick wall that faces the sun and you’ll feel this effect. Also, wind is generally measured high above the ground and with no trees or buildings nearby, often at airports. Down at ground level in my neighbourhood (or yours) the wind is less strong.

On the Humidex:

Now with spring coming, we turn to another way to make ourselves miserable and distort the weather all at once. We have the humidex. Again, it’s an approximation of how we feel, and yes, humidity makes heat worse, but this factor needs an overhaul.

Here’s an example. On one day in a recent summer, I found Detroit and next-door Windsor with temperatures near 28 C. The Weather Network gave Detroit a “feels like” reading of 30.5. But in Windsor, Environment Canada had a humidex of 38.

The humidex occasionally shows figures in the 50s in southern Canada, which is nearly equal to the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Toronto regularly gets humidex readings in the 40s, which is like summer in Arizona or south Texas, places where air sears the lungs and you can’t touch a steering wheel without running the air conditioning for several minutes beforehand.

Besides, what does it mean to say that we’re experiencing the equivalent of 35 degrees without humidity? When do we experience zero humidity in this country? It’s an illusory comparison, and continuing reinterpreting the temperature teaches us to misread the weather, with potentially dangerous results.

   Additional support is found in a fine work about old age, by an author who, like me agrees with the old concept about old age (see my OATS series where it is generally argued that 70 is not the new 50.) About the wind chill he notes on p.54: 

The wise old do not just instruct youth; they also buttonhole them to tell them tales of how much better it was back then or, if not better, then nobler and harder, when people were not spoiled by material success and indulgent parents. I really did walk through deep snow to school and there were no snow days off for excessive wind chill. That index was not kept. Once it was kept, people as far south as Nashville could claim to have endured zero degrees Fahrenheit when it was thirty-three on a mildly winter day. Wind chill is yet another instance of grade inflation penetrating into every nook and cranny of our lives.

From Losing It, by William Ian Miller. 

For more see: SO LONG SUMMER.

So Long Summer

    Now that the weather has turned I will move inside and try to do some blogging. I will start with something about summer which just disappeared. I am a fan of summer and hated to see it go. I dread the cold and dreary days to come. Most people around here do not agree with me and are eagerly awaiting the first snow. Perhaps I can use this post to attempt to understand why the winter lovers are now so happy and convince myself that summer is the bad season.

The Humidex

   I will not devote much time to this relatively new meteorological measure; I discussed it in my post about The Human Suffering Index. The haters of summer, it seems to me, tend to agree with the TV weather people when they say that we should stay inside because the temperature is 22, BUT it feels like 40. "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." I tend to prefer a high humidity to a high wind chill, but next summer I will wear sweatshirts and flannel Bermies in order to better empathize with those who are suffering through the summer season.

The Sun

   I am old so I tend to look forward to sunny skies, but I understand that now the sun is a bad thing. I am not sure about the status of Vitamin D.  I was misled in my youth by ads such as these, but being old I will not attempt to launch a class action law suit against the advertisers.

Next summer I will stay inside and stare at this cartoon so I am reminded of the dangers outdoors.

Mosquitos

I grew up along the mosquito-infested mid-Atlantic coast, where we boasted that they were as big as Piper Cubs. Having mosquito bites was like having sand in your shorts - small prices to pay for having cold beers on hot beaches. And we had fairly effective ways of dealing with the bugs and even had some fun doing so. On our bikes we would chase after the trucks spraying insecticides. When such solutions were delivered by aircraft in the Florida Keys, we could feel the spray when it landed on our heavily tanned skin. I will not launch a class action suit against the chemical companies because I am old enough to feel like I bear some responsibility for my actions. As well, it would set a precedent that my sons might follow and sue me for letting them cruise around shirtless in the Florida sunshine without life preservers. While there have been no melanomas as far as I know, they may at some point feel the pangs of PTSD because of the potential for melanomas and because of the swimming and boating experiences they endured - as well as the high Humidex.

Back then, only malaria was a concern and insecticides were not. Now we know that mosquitoes also are responsible for Zika, West Nile and Lyme Disease and that we probably should not have welcomed the showers of mosquito spray. I am still dreading the coming of winter, but I will spend part of it reading this new book by Canadian historian Timothy Winegard: The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. Apparently, "The general consensus of demographers is that about 108 billion human beings have ever lived, and that mosquito-borne diseases have killed close to half—52 billion people, the majority of them young children. While only 830,000 people were killed last year by mosquito bites, it is likely that they were bitten during the warm weather.

I will try to enjoy winter more, but will likely not enjoy summer less. There is just about as much of a likelihood of me avoiding the bright sunshine as there is of me achieving total sobriety.

Source:
  For a review of the Winegard book and the figure of 830,000 see: "The Mosquito Has Killed Millions and Changed Our DNA," Brian Bethune, Maclean's July 10, 2019.

The Sunblock cartoon is by Christopher Weyant and it is found in The New Yorker on July 5, 2020. I have a subscription and hope he won't mind.

The Human Suffering Index

     We have yet to get through "our severest winter commonly called spring." Although the meteorologists here have stopped warning us about the Wind Chill Factor, they will soon be sounding the alarm about the Humidity Index. Those at the Weather Channel have only been able to get through these drab doldrums by, either suggesting that great storms are on the horizon, or by showing us terrible weather from elsewhere. My wife has suggested that we need a new index - the Human Suffering Index - which will better measure the extent of our meteorological misery. It offers the extra benefit of allowing those of us who have experienced these dull and damp days to identify as "Victims" or "Survivors" so we can be like everyone else.


 

CODE RED 

     I thought it was just the weather people on the Mother Channel (the CBC for my southern readers) who issued dire warnings about being wizened by the wind chill or scorched by the sun if the temperature was a degree-or-two below or above the number on the thermostat. Apparently, however, the practice of dramatizing the weather is widespread. We prefer our weather alerts to be alarming, just as we want our news to be breaking. Of course, the bosses at headquarters know this, even though most of them aren’t meteorologists. Recently, those in charge at the Sinclair Broadcast Group sent a memo to the stations they own suggesting that labelling most of the Weather Alerts as “Code Red", would surely be a good idea. Ratings metrics may have played more of a role than meteorology in the decision making.


     The weather guy at the Sinclair station in Springfield, Illinois is either a fan of Chicken Little, or a reader of Aesop’s Fables. Or perhaps he is just an honest weather guy who thinks that constantly crying wolf is not in the public interest. The good news is that he told his viewers the truth. The bad news is that he was fired.

Sources:
"A TV Meteorologist Objected to Management’s ‘Code Red’ Orders in on-air Apology. He Might Be Out of a Job", By Matthew Cappucci Washington Post, June 7, 2019.
"More Criticism for Sinclair Over 'Code Red' Weather Warnings, David Zurawik,
The Baltimore Sun, June 17, 2019.
"The Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group has been in the news the last two weeks for the controversial firing of a meteorologist at one of its stations who called out the company on-air over what he characterized as the hyped use of “code red” weather warnings.
But the use of “code red” as described by Crain seems an especially egregious way to use fear to try to drive ratings, and it goes to the heart of what journalism is and isn’t supposed to do."

Post Script:
    The clever quote about spring is from Cowper as loyal readers will know. See "The Dead of Winter."
   My wife insists she thought of the Human Suffering Index and apparently she did. A search found an International Human Suffering Index, but it is unrelated to the weather.

   Speaking of "indexes": A while back, I came up with the "Pajama Index" which indicates that seeing a lot of mid-30s citizens at mid-day in PJs sitting at a Tim Hortons is not a good thing, economically speaking. I searched to see if such an index existed and found one. I probably read the article so some other Irish person likely deserves the credit for creating the PJ Index: "The Irish Economy’s Rise Was Steep, and the Fall Was Fast," Landon Thomas, New York Times, Jan.3, 2009. “Social workers in Moyross refer to the “pajama index”: the more men and women one sees who do not take the time and care to dress for the day, the worse the economic situation tends to be.”
   The sinister Sinclair corporation owns a large number of U.S. broadcast stations. If you are conservative, you should be happy about that.

Canadian Content - The Humidex is a Canadian creation. Perhaps it is yet another thing we should apologize for, in that the humidity is one thing Canadians cannot tolerate and because it gave rise to the too oft-heard whine, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity."