Today’s weather: Frantic!

A mere run-of-the-mill storm brewing in the Alberta prairies.

I just want to go over some of the phrases I have heard to describe weather. So far, we have heard of

  • thunder snow
  • polar vortex
  • bombogenesis
  • derechoes
  • meteotsunami

Of course, this is in addition to those boring old hurricanes, avalanches, whiteouts, monsoons and tornadoes, which are so “old school” that perhaps nobody cares anymore. And now meteorologiests have invented something else for us to worry about:

  • bomb cyclone

I swear they must pay someone to sit in a back room somewhere to create some way to sensationalize the weather with invented terminology. The fact is, it is enough that tornadoes alone this year have given us much to worry about along the redneck riviera states (a new term I am expanding on to include Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi — states along the Gulf of Mexico — here is the “known” definition) and other states in the Southern United States. So have droughts, which led to the forest fires all along the west coast of North America, from southern California to British Columbia.

I am aware that these extreme weather conditions are a part of global warming, and I am not going to deny that. I am against inventing new terms when perfectly good ones exist. Using existing terms, along with some kind of quantification (like wind speed, air pressure, temperature, wind chill, and so on) gives us a way to compare these weather events with earlier ones so that we can make up our own minds. Giving things a unique name obscures any attempt at comparison, which I think results in disinforming the public rather than informing them.

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