My friend Kathy Kennedy, the newscaster, at 92-CITI-FM, received a nasty e-mail from a local golf course operator last week. The operator was righteously pissed off, but he didn’t know who to blame, so he blamed the woman he listens to every morning.
K.K. was taken aback, a little shaken by the vitriol, but she knew it wasn’t her fault. She receives weather reports from the federal government’s weather agency and reads them on the radio. That’s all. That’s why the federal government MUST do something about Environment Canada.
Either fix it or shut it down.
Weather forecasting has become so insanely bad that if you believe a word of what you hear in the media, you are (a) too gullible to live or (b) just as nuts as the weather forecasters who will actually tell you they’re right most of the time. And believe me, many of those clowns truly believe they’re doing the public a service. Truth is, they’re seriously hurting commerce in this country and they should be stopped.
Or they should actually make an effort to get it right.
This past week, we saw the commercial impact of tremendously bad weather forecasting. Our angry golf course operator complained that Enviro-Guess Canada’s prediction that it would rain all day on Wednesday and Thursday cost him more than $3,000 in lost revenue. People were told it would rain all day – both days — decided not to play golf.
Of course, we know that on both days, the weather was absolutely perfect. I played at Steinbach Fly-In on Wednesday with Jimmy Toth from Shaw TV and Ken Wiebe from the Sun. It was a great day and the weather was absolutely sensational.
However, as we sat with the Fly-In’s greens’ superintendent, Rob Fast, afterward, he lamented the fact that play at the public golf course had been limited this spring, not so much because of the rain but because of the prediction of rain.
“It’s been really slow,” Fast said. “When you keep telling people it’s going to rain all day, they find other things to do.”
This spring, the attendance at Winnipeg Goldeyes baseball games has been down. Granted, there have been some cold nights this spring and while the tickets have been sold, folks are staying home. However, on far too many occasions, people listen and watch the weather reports and decide to avoid sitting outside at the ball game because they’re told, “there is an 80 per cent chance of rain.” And, far too often, there is no rain at all.
I’ll be the first to admit that weather forecasting is an inexact science, but it’s reached the point here in Manitoba that it’s so inexact it’s not even a good guess anymore. The people who foist this bullshit on us must be stopped.
I call the play-by-play of Goldeyes games on television and like most of the front-office staff I spend hours gazing at Environment Canada’s internet radar screen. I have come to the conclusion that no one — not one person on the planet — can predict weather more than 45 minutes in advance. Anyone who suggests that long-term weather forecasts are accurate are either TV weather stars, who are paid far more than they’re worth, or people who are simply delusional.
It’s time to stop it! Weather forecasting is so inaccurate, so often, that it is hurting commerce in Canada, especially in the Central part of the country. Ultimately, it is theft disguised as information.
Somebody call the cops.