Doing Something About the Weather

Mark Twin is generally credited with the famous statement, “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” But Bartlett’s Quotations says there is no credible evidence of the statement in Twain’s writings. Bartlett’s says it is actually attributed to Charles Dudley Warner, a friend of Twain. According to Bartlett’s, what Warner actually wrote, in an editorial in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant, August 27, 1897, p. 8, was: “A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.”

Well, the Mayor of Moscow wants to do something about it. Or about bad forecasts at least. A long time critic of the Moscow Weather Bureau, Mayor Yury Luzhkov threatened to fire everyone in the weather office unless more accurate and timely forecasts are produced. His most recent tirade came as a result of a badly missed temperature prediction and a record snowfall that was incorrectly forecast.
Lushkov wants the forecasters to have to pay financial penalties for incorrect forecasts. The Mayor has proposed that all funding for the weather service be cut off until a contractual agreement can be agreed upon that would hold the forecasters financially liable.

Of course, perfect weather forecasts are still beyond the reach of the science of meteorology as we know it today. Even with superior technology and computer models, our knowledge of the atmosphere is still rather elementary. It will be interesting to follow this story over the coming months.