And now, fake weather forecasts

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 16, 2017

Here on the East Coast, we were hit with a major snowstorm on Tuesday. You probably read about it, even if you live somewhere else; the forecasts were all over the national news, with predictions of a potential disaster. Then something very interesting happened.

In the last hours before the snow arrived, forecasters saw a shift in their models. Metereologists realized that most East Coast cities would have much less snow than they had predicted. It would still be a major storm, but not a huge one.

So at the last minute the forecasters changed their predictions, right? Wrong. The National Weather Service meteorologists put their heads together and decided to continue predicting a catastrophe. “Out of extreme caution we decided to stick with higher amounts,” said Gerg Carbin, who heads the Weather Prediction Center in Maryland.

You see, the forecasters decided that it would be good for us to expect a huge amount of snow. Then we’d all be prepared, and we’d be pleasantly surprised when the snowfall was less than we had anticipated.

Where I live, the snowfall was a bit less than a foot—not the the 18 to 24 inches we had been told to expect. We were all plowed out by nightfall. And yes, we were relieved.

But then the next day I learned that the forecasters had deliberately given us misleading predictions, because they thought they knew what was good for us. That attitude worries me, frankly, more than the prospect of two feet of snow.

We’re known for years that media outlets provide us with the news that the broadcasters want us to hear, and sometimes the editors tilt the news one way or another, to accommodate their own political perspectives. But now the weather forecasters, too?