Weather at Eleven

The ‘news’ business is not doing well, as we all know, particularly at the local level. My local London newspaper, despite being a monopoly in that business, is down to a handful of employees, publishes only 5 days per week, and doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do much of anything that would have been called ‘reporting’ twenty years ago. Stories about local crime, for example, are clearly just pasted from whatever the London Police put up on their News website.

This is generally attributed to the fact that people get their local news from social media, an explanation that ignores the issue of where social media gets its information from.

One might think that local weather reporting would be better. The only weather that matters to most people is local; we want to know if it’s going to rain where we live, not in Sri Lanka. However, weather reporting has gone national, too. I suspect most people in Canada now get their weather info from The Weather Network, which will give you short and long-term forecasts for your specific area of Canada at a click. For myself, I use Accuweather, which is a US website. I just bookmarked their Port Huron page, that being a town in Michigan some 90km directly west of where I live.

I use that largely because their weather radar is rather superior to what one can get from Environment Canada, and looking at current radar images is the best forecasting tool there is for precipitation. However, Accuweather is still an internet company, and thus subject to the ‘enshittification’ that all such organizations exhibit.

That is to say, what Accuweather wants you to do is click things on their site, as then you will see more ads, and hence they will get more revenue. They therefore give you many items on which to click, those items connection to the weather being…..uh, tenuous.

Here is a list of the headlines under the category of Weather News on the Accuweather website over the last several days:

Read the Coast Guard Report on the implosion of the Titan submersible

Third girl dies after sailboat and barge collision in Miami

Italian Farmers set up turnstiles to charge admission to hot spots

Small earthquake hits near New York City

Texas to enact sweeping camp safety law to protect kids

FAA investigating plane that went off end of runway after landing

Scientists have created rechargeable, multicolored, glow-in-the-dark succulent plant

I thought about sponsoring a contest to see who could best write a story under each headline that would somehow make it actually about weather in some way. I decided it was too easy, since all of life happens with some kind of weather around, and I suppose that is how Accuweather justifies to itself (if it bothers at all) posting all these stories under ‘Weather News’.

This is the same routine that has resulted in the enshittification of search engines. They are no longer designed to help you find info, they are designed to keep you clicking, so that Google can get paid. If you just find what you are looking for on the first page of results, there’s little money in that for Google, so they feed you shit that is barely related to what you are looking for to keep you clicking and trying new queries, then clicking some more.

Do you remember when you could refine your search query by putting quotes around it? You know, you type in air conditioning repair and you get results that have any of those three words in them, so you instead type in “air conditioning repair” and get only results that contain those three words in that order. That doesn’t work any more, go ahead and try it. It doesn’t even work any more on the shitty search engine the university library now makes one use to find things in their holdings. One has to just wade through thousands of books and articles that have nothing to do with what one typed into the beast.

Anyway, getting back to the weather,  I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but this year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been vewy vewy qwiet. It has been more than two months since it started, and there have been only six named storms, only one of which reached hurricane status. That one, Erin, had the temerity to stay far away from the continental US. There is always hope, the ‘official season’ lasts until Nov 30, but so far – nearly nada.

Now there is nothing the news media – not just the weather reporters – like better than a good hurricane, as each storm provides Big Headline clickbait for a good month, from the beginnings of the storm as a ‘tropical depression’ through tracking its path and intensity, and then, if it actually makes landfall, weeks of stories about the damage and cleanup and, if they’re really lucky, deaths.

Well, if you have no news of actual hurricanes to run at Accuweather, you can only resort to stories like this, categorized under the category ‘Hurricane’.

Is the Northeast overdue for a hurricane? Here’s what it would take.

Or

Atlantic tropical rainstorm may reach Caribbean as a hurricane.

Can’t you just feel the hope in those headlines?

The other reason for hope is this. The NOAA (The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) put this news release out on August 7

Prediction remains on track for above-normal Atlantic hurricane season: NOAA urges advanced preparations

As the 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season enters its historical peak, atmospheric and oceanic conditions continue to favor an above-normal season as NOAA first predicted in May.

The details of their forecast included a prediction of 13-16 ‘named storms’  and 5-9 hurricanes.

To date: 1 hurricane. 6 named storms. With the season more than half over, Mother Nature better get moving, right? I am sure Accuweather – not to mention CNN, CBC, etc., etc. – all have their fingers crossed.