Windchill, shmind chill. Stop monkeying
around, and let weather be weather.
With winter behind us and summer ahead, I'd like to take this pause
in the seasons to request that the people in charge of the nation's
climate stop monkeying around with the weather.
For the record, I haven't heard anything definitive about summer.
It might be OK. I don't know. But I'm betting that the Weather
Mess-Arounders will get around to it, if not this summer, some
summer soon.
Why? Because they've already messed around with cold, and these
people are not the type to leave well enough alone.
We're talking here about researchers at the National Laboratory for
Nothing Better To Do. These are not people who get paid to sit on
their hands, like corporate executives. No, these are people who
get paid to do something. One of the things they did recently was
change the windchill factor.
Having assiduously studied the issue and concluded that the
windchill factor was something nobody cared about, they worked
round-the-clock to develop a new way to calculate how cold we feel
when it's too cold to feel much of anything.
Introduced at the start of last winter, the average difference is
15 degrees warmer under the new method. That explains why, despite
epic snowfall in
Buffalo, once-in-a-lifetime blizzards throughout
the South, and general wintertime mayhem, you felt so much warmer
this past winter than in winters past. You did feel warmer, right?
Before going further, I should point out in the interest of full
disclosure that the windchill factor has long been one of my top
pet peeves. I rank it just below drivers who go too slow in the
left-hand lane, which gives you a pretty good idea of how much I'm
rankled by it. It rankles me, and I would not say that rankle is
too strong a word, because it is science at its most presumptuous.
Weatherman: Oooooh, it's a balmy 26 degrees out there. (Yuk, yuk.)
But bundle up because the windchill says it feels like, brrrr, 3
degrees.