Weather Prophets

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 461, 23 April 1948, Page 5

Weather Prophets

HE trouble with the weather, as the Prime Minister told the meteorologists, is that it refuses now and again to play up to the prophets. Prophecy has of course been a dangerous line since the beginning of history, but something is lost when its practitioners go out of business. If weather prophets have not given up altogether, they have sought safety in science, and that is the same thing. They have become gamblers in certainties, which is about as adventurous as going to the races when you know all the winners. A meteorologist is not so much a forecaster as a calculator, with hundreds of people watching him to seé that he does not go wrong. By comparison with the prophet, who had little to go on but his corns, his rheumatism, and an active imagination, the meteorologist is a newspaper Office and a university in one, with facts flowing in every hour from the ends of the earth, and several miles above it. It is amazing to think that he can in spite of everything still be wrong sometimes, and not altogether a comfortable thought that the day may come when he will always be right. But it has not come yet. The conference that met in Wellington last week was not at all assertive or over-confident. It was like the leader-writer who has written too many bad articles to have any satisfaction in a good one: so many of its calculations had gone astray, so many secrets escaped its utmost wisdom and prudence, that it was a little uncomfortable when the Prime Minister praised meteorology’s accuracy in general. There may even have been a reason why it met ‘in a country with a notoriously ‘unpredictable climate. It probably felt sure of our sympathy at least if not of our full understanding. In any case it is not without significance that the picker of D-day was a New Zealander, and that the weather treated him as badly as it did everyone else,