Bullshit headlines
I love it when the meeja gets in a flap over something.
Spike in number of weather alerts and warnings for 2014
Scary, huh?
There's even more scary stuff to follow –
It’s official: the wet and windy southwest has endured the wildest weather since Met Éireann’s colour-coded warning system was introduced
It's official so we have to be scared.
Oh, hang on…. sorry….. I missed a bit at the end –
It’s official: the wet and windy southwest has endured the wildest weather since Met Éireann’s colour-coded warning system was introduced in 2012
Wow! So there were more weather alerts in 2014 than there were in 2013 or 2012? Somehow my heart palpitations are easing a bit.
But hold on…..
These are weather alerts, not weather. Those alerts are indications of what they think is going to happen at the time, and quite often they are hopelessly wrong. We have had Amber Alerts warning of torrential rain only to be greeted by a couple of showers. And anyway these alerts are purely subjective things. Is there a precise mathematical definition of the danger level of a prediction or do the weather people just go on a hunch – "We think it might piss down tomorrow so we'd better issue an Amber Alert. No, hang on, we'll make that a Red Alert just in case some house might get flooded"?
So I have advice for two groups.
For the people in Met Éireann – step up the Valium a tad and you'll find the alerts decrease correspondingly.
For the people in the Irish Times – don't try and fill your pages with garbage just because you have nothing to say.
If I have nothing to say I wouldn't stoop to writing bullshit. I just don't write.
In fact, today is a perfect example.
You can only laugh
Maybe that's it? Maybe they're just trying to give us a chuckle? It worked!
I was taught that a lie of omission is still a lie!
So are you calling me a liar on the days I don't write?
Care to step outside?
That could only work if there is an assumption that everything you write is a lie. Is that what you're saying?
Everything I write is a lie.
It's just an advertorial for Met Éireann. The colour coded weather service.
An Austrian friend laughs when in the wintertime Met Eireann issue a "yellow snow alert".
Heh! That hadn't even crossed my mind, but then I'm an innocent.
"Hey, Ian", he shouts, "don't eat the yellow snow!"
I'm working on a bullshit detector system with colour coded alerts.
Maybe I should put a wee colour coded set of buttons on each post so people can vote on the bulshittedness?
Now you're cookin'.
You think you have problems? The Met Office here in England are so useless here they can't even get the weather right here and now, never mind the forecast. This morning on our local BBC county radio station it announced at breakfast that the day would start cloudy and clear later. Not a cloud in the sky – don't they even look out of the window? And don't start me on the long range weather forecasts…