It explains why the Bureau of Meteorology is generally under siege, and no more so than this week.
A pair of private audit-hounds — one a retired geochemist, the other a feller whose website claims 30 years of “revealing the thoughts of corporate audiences” — went digging through the bureau’s historical data. They discovered that Sydney’s record for August of 1867 was identical to August of 1907, day for day.
The bureau checked, and admitted some bloke with a punch card in 1958 must have had a very long lunch, but pointed out this was fewer than 200 dud readings out of seven million. Statistically irrelevant, they sniffed.
No-one paid any attention to that. The Australian ran eight outraged pieces. Tony Abbott demanded an inquiry. The Coalition declared the bureau a laughingstock, while The Guardian called the panic a fever swamp. Everybody, in short, was barking.
The Boss had his little yelp too, reminding me that the bureau had spent $96.5 million on a website that farmers couldn’t load properly, and had commissioned an inquiry into why nobody trusted it. It reports in March 2027. Bring an umbrella. Or a kayak.
I have watched this undignified scramble from the riverbank with professional interest because I am a walking weather station. I am unfunded, uncalibrated, and frankly, a lot more accurate.
Consider the specs. With my nose’s 300 million scent receptors, I know rain is coming 40 minutes before the Boss’s phone does, and three days before the bureau’s website finishes loading. I can feel a falling barometer through a closed door. When a thunderstorm is 20km off, I can quietly locate myself between the couch and the fireplace well before I can be accused of being a scaredy-cat.
Mr White was right that the weather is the last true democracy. Everyone’s opinion on it is equally valid, and it is the only really common talk we have: a grain grower deciding whether to spray, or cut for hay; a bride deciding whether to risk the garden; a retriever deciding whether the morning walk is worth it. And when our assessment proves wrong, it’s handy to blame it on the bureau as soon as it goes pear-shaped.
Mind you, we dogs end up suffering from poor forecasting anyway, despite our natural superiority.
“It’s only drizzle,” The Boss will say, locking me in the dog pen with that breezy optimism.
It is never only drizzle. When the downpour comes, I could crawl into a spider-infested kennel, but pride has me stoically enduring the deluge, so my oily coat has me smelling like a swamp and makes him feel guilty when he deigns to rescue me.
The scientists hounding the bureau also claimed that a record of 17 straight days of exactly 31°C at Palmerville in Queensland was a statistical impossibility. The bureau says it’s the tropics, they rounded to the nearest degree, and that’s just what happens up there if you want to go try it.
For once, I believe the bureau. It makes sense in the tropics — where it’s hot and humid every day — that places like Palmerville simply can’t be bothered having weather. They pick a temperature and stick with it, like a bloke with a haircut he settled on in 1974. Woof!
