Wind chill is BUNK. Broadcast weathermen trying to make every day a disaster, today on The Tenth Man
The past couple weeks the TV weathermen have been breathlessly exclaiming about “dangerous wind chill”. This is nonsense. We expect the NEWS to be full of politics and hyperbole, but how can the Weatherman, the weather being kind of sciency, be spending so much time on a metric that is entirely made up?
Back in the forties a couple of “scientists” noticed for the first time ever that cool breezes were – well – cool. They decided to be famous and “figure the rate of heat loss in watts per square meter and then try to match it up to an equivalent rate produced in low-wind conditions” and call it “wind chill.”
It’s how you “feel” when the wind hits you, and if the TV news loves anything it’s “feelings”.
But that’s dishonest. Cold is cold, but cool and breezy is just that, cool and breezy. According to the TV guys, you can put a bottle of water out in 40 degree weather with a fifteen mile per hour wind, and wind chill of 31.8 will freeze the water bottle. Well it won’t. It’s still forty degrees, not 31.8. Period.
When they say the wind chill is freezing they’re saying what the wind outside feels like on bare skin. Well who goes outside in January with bare skin? As soon as you put on clothes, there is no wind chill. If your clothes are knit and winds are high, there might be air infiltration, but that’s cold air infiltration, not wind chill. A windbreaker will cure that.
You see why this matters. They’re not telling you to wear a windbreaker, they’re telling you it’s dangerous which is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Think about your kids. How are they supposed to process this bad information repeated endlessly?
Lots of things affect our perception of temperature. Pick up THIS pot off the stove and you’re fine. Pick THIS one up and you better have a potholder. Same temperature, one conducts heat better – but we don’t have a “Handle Heat” index do we?
Returning to the outdoors, would you rather plunge into fifty degree air or fifty degree water? They’re the same temperature, but everyone knows you’ll get hyperthermia in the water. Yet we don’t have a “Wet Chill” index.
It feels cooler in the shade and at night, but there’s no weatherman announcing a “plunging ‘Dark Chill Index’ today in the evening hours”.
The broadcast news is just determined to have a calamity every day. That calamity craving has spread to the weather and that’s all there it to it. Everybody, meaning we the people, talks about the weather, but it’s small talk. The weather is pretty much the same every year. It’s not UNPRECEDENTED; stop trying to make it so.
We already have too many topics in our lives taking away our attention from what’s important, and have too little time for the news to waste any of it.
During the worst cold weather recently the news spent most of the broadcast talking about dangerously low wind chills, then tacked on to the end a ten second statement that in southeast Michigan people were sitting in their cars to get warm because the electricity had been out for three days. That’s a real danger, one the government and the fourth estate OUGHT to be working on, but they’re making it worse promoting electric cars and banning gas furnaces.
The news is already full of useless distractions. Let’s keep the dangerous distractions out of the weather.
