Can We Really Predict The Weather?  

By Harris Dalton

I honestly couldn't tell you what is going to happen tomorrow, which is my confession that I have no idea if the proponents of global warming are right or wrong. I know that 40 mules died of heat stroke in my home county of Sumter, Georgia, in the early 1930s and that it was 33 degrees below zero in North Korea in the 1950s, so the temperature has been known to vary during my lifetime.

Taking empirical data of weather predicting accuracy in 5-day forecasts, I would say the chances of long-range calculations become highly speculative. My personal survival rule of thumb is: if I hear Ken Cook's warning to take cover, I have survived, and the storm is past.
Rain forecasts during drought periods are more prayers for help than substantive meteorological data-based forecasts. I interviewed a lady in Douglasville back in the 1960s who maintained that weather forecasting was a sin. She cited the Bible as stating that no person should claim to see into the future.

I remember being stranded in Atlanta after Johnny Beckman assured the listening audience there was no chance of snow. At another time during an extremely cold period in the 1960s, I heard Johnny Beckman predict another ice age. And then there was the time of a serious Georgia drought, and Johnny told his audience it would take 10 years for the lakes to fill back up. They were filled in one month of constant spring rains. And who can forget the panic in the early 1980s when an unpredicted snow storm stranded thousands of motorists along I-285?

I'm reminded of an honest meteorologist I met while attending the University of Georgia. He had been a government meteorologist in Atlanta and had become frustrated by the number of inaccuracies his department was releasing.

"I thought a sabbatical away from the daily pressures of predicting the weather would be good for me, clear my mind so I could think more logically," he told me. "I'm taking a course on the history of climate changes and the speculations as to what caused the Ice Age and the subsequent thaw. Right now, we seem to be better at figuring out what happened in the past than predicting what is going to happen. (Writer's note: There are serious doubts in the public mind as to the accuracies of these theories.)

"My theory is that if I can learn what phenomena brought on these climate shifts, we can recognize them when they occur and predict accordingly. I was brought up on a farm in North Carolina, and my dad has been a farmer all his life. He can walk out in the morning, look at how the smoke is rising from the tenant farmer's chimney and tell you what the weather's going to be like. He's dead right 99% of the time.

"With data from weather balloons all over the world, water and atmospheric temperature recordings, maps and charts, pressure and velocity gauges, we are lucky to get it right 60% of the time when change is indicated," he lamented.

I took the summer off to take a job selling butane tanks to rural people who had no access to natural gas lines while the meteorologist stayed in Athens and took a summer course. Returning to college for the fall quarter, I was crossing the street at Lumpkin and Broad when the meteorologist pulled up in his convertible and excitedly shouted, "Hop in, I've got something to show you."

We drove out to the nearby rural section of Watkinsville, and he pulled up to a dilapidated barn where a mule was braying in his stall. As we walked to the barn, the sun was a blistering gold, and the earth seemed to be sweating dust. The old mule had obviously seen her best days, but despite being blind in her right eye, she recognized the meteorologist.

"This is Daisy," he proclaimed with pride. "She and I have had a love affair this summer, and a corn crop now grows where we trod together."

He took me out behind the barn and proudly showed me the 25-acre corn crop he and Daisy had planted and cultivated into seven-foot stalks.

"I thought if I spent some time communing with nature I'd get a better feel for her moods, and you know, I got to where I could actually sense the rain building up for afternoon showers," he declared.

He promised me some fresh corn when it ripened, but I didn't take him up on the offer since I had no way of cooking corn at the funeral home where I worked and lived while attending college.

Like so many of my college associates, I've lost track of the meteorologist, but I have wondered if he is part of the team investigating global warming. If so, I wouldn't be surprised should he have chummed up with a polar bear to go salmon fishing with while they observe the melting Arctic cap.

I've learned from watching and listening that a meteorology expert is one who can explain tomorrow why the predictions he made yesterday didn't happen today.