Weathered

Cathedral City, California

January 11, 2020

     It has been almost 40 years since the Weather Channel began on cable TV.   That means that more than a generation, and close to half the people alive today, don’t remember when the weather only occupied five minutes or less of the local evening news, and that was it.  Then, as now, the goofiest and otherwise least upwardly mobile of the news crew members would stand in front of a map of the United States or their state and gesture at high pressure centers and temperature readings, and push the weather in from the west.  Regular watchers would find out what the forecast was where they lived for the next day or perhaps the next few days, and prepare accordingly.  And then the sports guy would come on and talk about more important things.

     Today, the basic format for local weather reports remains about the same as always.  The big difference is that now we have, in addition, an entire channel devoted to nothing but the weather, in all its glorious and varied forms, not just in and around where we live but throughout the whole damned world.  This in turn has produced a generation of home weather aficionados, many of whom have gone a step or two further and become utterly obsessed with the weather, and often quite phobic about it.

     Let me say near the outset of this post that I do believe we're in the midst of climate change and global warming, much of which owes itself to human intervention due to the release into the atmosphere of lots and lots of good old carbon dioxide.  Having said that, I must also state with confidence that not every single fluctuation in the weather is due to global warming.  There are trends and cycles.  And global warming and cooling have happened in the past, without the assistance of billions of energy-hungry consumers.  But still, we are seeing some rather rapid melting at the poles, with a concomitant rise in sea levels and changes in weather streams and patterns, causing who knows what, weatherwise.  But not everything.

     As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.  Of course, when he said that, the implied joke was that nobody could do anything about it.  Today we're pretty sure that not only have we done something about the weather, but that we ought to undo it, or slow it down a bit.  But Twain is still basically right, I think, in that it's probably too late to do much to change the trends of the next century or so.  Alea iacta est, the die is cast, in the words of Julius Caesar, another fun guy to quote.  So I say we shouldn't do a whole lot of hand-wringing; rather, we should just try, within the limits of our poor powers, to slow down the profligate use of CO2-producing stuff.  We’ll figure it out, slowly, and nothing apocalyptic is likely to happen, but in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to build higher dikes.

     Now back to the Weather Channel, which would exist even if global warming weren't a thing.  Somebody down in Atlanta, probably Ted Turner, got this idea that certainly tapped into the general populace's preoccupation with weather, identified so long ago by our favorite national pundit.  The thinking probably went, why should people wait until the evening news to find out about the weather?  And what with people's families spread out all over the country, wouldn't it be nice for them if they could know what kind of weather their children or parents are having, so they can have something else to talk about and worry about?  And therein lies the kernel of the continuous irritant that is the existence of the Weather Channel, which has by now figured out ways to fill in its airtime with shows about tornado chasing, and all that silly stuff.

      At present I reside in the desert in southern California.  Many people don't know quite where Cathedral City is, and California is a very big state.  But what they do know, thanks to the 24-hour weather reports engendered by, or inspired by the existence of, the Weather Channel, is that certain big weather-related things happen in California--earthquakes of course, and also wild fires, mud slides, excessive rain, not enough rain, flash floods, and so on.  I can tell readily which of my nearest and dearest are watching the Weather Channel (meaning that they don't have a lot else to do), and also which of them are becoming with advancing age more generally worried and fretful about a world over which they have no control (as if they ever did).  I can tell this by their inquiries via text about whether I am in the path of some fire or other meteorological event.  I appreciate it, but hell, if I was in any danger I'd let you know, unless I was buried under a mountain of lava or something.  More often than not these well-meaning worriers are off by at least a hundred miles from where I'm living, because, as I said, California is a big state, about which it is really hard to generalize, though people try to do so all the time.

     Preoccupation with the weather, I think, stands in for a lot of other fears we have, such as fear of geopolitical calamities, and of sudden unforeseen injuries, illnesses and deaths.  In other words, fears of things we can't do a thing about.   And if we're doing okay where we live, we wonder and worry about the people on the other side of the country.  Practically speaking, as we move ever more toward urbanization and away from the era of the individual farmer, most of us don't really need to worry about the weather.  Yeah, it'll be hotter or colder than we like, and snow and rain will come at inopportune times, but the majority of us have decent housing, no crops to worry about, plenty of good roads and safe vehicles to navigate them, and anyway, we lead lives that increasingly keep us indoors, rather than out in the open.  If anything, weather should be becoming less important to us rather than more so.  But that isn't the case.  If it's going to be slippery we wonder whether school should be closed and whether we should venture outside.  If it's going to be hot we worry about whether we should take extra water.  None of these considerations were not there half a century ago, and yes, people died of heat stroke and slipped on the ice and broke their necks, but generally these were treated as isolated unfortunate events, not as part of an almost conspiratorial assault on us by the weather gods.  The prevailing feeling then seems to have been that shit happens, so be careful.

     The media feeds this weather obsession relentlessly, as you might expect.  Hurricanes and earthquakes aside, the weather and the news used to be separate concepts for the most part, but no more.  Today, as often as not, the weather is the news.  There are several reasons for this in addition to the ones I've already noted here.  One is the need to fill up more and more air time.  In reality there never was, nor is there now, more than about fifteen to thirty minutes of news worth knowing about on any given day.  Huntley and Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, used to do a half hour a night, and that was more than enough.  But with cable TV we have multiple all-news channels (not to mention that all-weather channel) that run 24 hours a day.  Almost at the same time as the Weather Channel came CNN.  But there are only so many ways you can slice fifteen to thirty minutes of daily news to make it spread out over a full day.  Jesus was said to have taken five loaves of bread and two fish and broken them into enough pieces to feed thousands of people.  I think the TV people aspire to do the same with the meager quotidian information at their disposal.  But they're not miracle-workers, and their efforts end up looking silly and repetitious.  One very sure filler on any news day is a look at the uglier side of the weather.  A heat wave overtakes the east, and every person who dies during the heat wave from any cause that is even remotely connected to the heat becomes a casualty of that heat wave.  A regular heat wave becomes The Killer Heat Wave, The Heat Wave That Has Claimed 17 Lives So Far, The Heat Wave That Ate Cleveland.  Thus are our appetites for apocalyptic entertainment and true-life schadenfreude appeased simultaneously.

     I certainly don't gainsay the need to, say, warn people in Florida or Louisiana of an approaching hurricane.  That should be a matter of course.  But to devote 24 or 48 or 72 hours of continuous coverage to flying debris and palm trees bent under the wind is just too much--rather like looking at a dead body from every conceivable angle, then watching the autopsy and subsequent cremation of the remains.

     But as I stated at the beginning, we have a generation or two of people who have never known any other media-produced reality than that of nonstop concern about the weather.  Fifty years ago, and even a hundred and fifty years ago, the weather was just as good and bad as it is now, with people far less well equipped to handle it.  We see temperature and precipitation records being broken all the time, but they usually contain telling statistical points, such as "this is the hottest it's been in Chicago on this day since 1923" (before air conditioning), or "the worst blizzard in New York since 1888" (before snow plows and central heating).  In other words, much more really bad shit is behind us than we imagine to be lurking just around the corner.  In the 1930s a drought in the middle of the country, combined with poor crop management techniques, caused a disaster we call the Dust Bowl--as devastating as anything we've seen since.  And somehow, against all odds, people knew all they needed to know about it, even without the Weather Channel.  Imagine that.