Weather Is Not News

Or so I used to think that weather was not news, not until I saw the southeastern tornado devastation over the week.

Under most conditions not involving death or dismemberment, the weather is simply not news. It rains. It gets windy. Hail falls. Snow melts. These are natural things and are often reported excessively, with a camera crew up at Blue Canyon, watching the snow fall, or a camera crew on a bridge overlooking a swollen river.

I can blog about them, however, as blogs are opinions, not newsworthy outlets. Thursday and Friday were awful days to be riding a bicycle between Elk Grove and Sacramento -- 17mph winds from the direct north. I arrived at work both days with completely bloodshot eyes full of debris and the ingestion of a sufficient quantity of pollen to stun a cape buffalo. I'm not normally allergic to trees (grasses, yes, which peak here in another three-four weeks) but all this flying at me at 27 mph (10 on the bike + 17 from the wind) left me wheezing for a few hours each morning.

It is not at all worth the 25 minutes each afternoon I get to ride at 22 mph down Franklin Blvd. home with the wind behind me. Fun, yes...but it doesn't offset the misery of the mornings.

A question was posed on the NBC nightly news about how bad our weather has become, and not so subtly the answer becomes "man's contribution to global climate disruption leads to exacerbation of extreme weather events." That's interesting. Still, the worst tornado "event" occurred in 1899, worst in total deaths, that is. Seems to me this was still pretty early in the industrial revolution, although coal had been consumed in great quantities even then.

We are always looking for a reason, for a rationale for why a tornado comes in an wipes a quarter of a town off the map. Survivors thank God for his mercy, while those killed are now thanking God directly, too. I will argue that, because the earth spins around the sun at a rate of one revolution every 24 hours, tornadoes and hurricanes...just...happen. Weather happens. A tornado in the year 1325 in Oklahoma was presumably just as bad for any Native American as it is for an American in 2011, and presumably will be just as bad for any American in 2208.