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The Weather Bomb and The War on Weather
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- Category: Latest
- Published: 11 December 2014
- Written by Rod
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Over the years the Met Office have become increasingly tabloid in their weather predictions. Not content with offering the usual 3-5 day forecast in past years they have tried to predict whole seasons (who can forget the barbecue summer when it rained everyday) despite the fact that our weather in the uk, produced by volatile weather systems, endlessly resists long term prediction.
Yesterday was a new low in this trajectory with advent of the 'Weather Bomb', which turns out to be nothing more special than a vigorously developing low pressure: The kind of event that happens all the time in winter and autumn in the uk.
It was so obviously a way of ramping up the tabloid speculation about normal winter weather patterns so that they can be recast as some sort of cataclysmic event.
After the storms of last winter 'weather' now has news currency, but like all news stories needs to be constantly reinvented so as not to appear as repetition, and so the present can alway be cast as in a state of crisis. This time borrowing language more associated with the war on terror than meteorological phenomenon.
Mary Ann Doane's brilliant 'Information, Crisis, Catastrophe' laid this mechanism bare nearly 15 years ago.
In the event the 'Weather Bomb' at Kimmeridge bay amounted to not much more than a 25knot breeze and a small wind swell, but I haven't looked at the news today, perhaps Scotland was blown half way to Scandinavia but I doubt it.
Here is Jason making good use of un-cataclysmic conditions.
Authors: Rod
Read more https://forwards4cowards.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-weather-bomb-and-war-on-weather.html