Mystery White House Tweet: Snow During January Heat Wave

The White House released this since-deleted Tweet Sunday night
announcing the first snowfall of the year. At the time it was 53
degrees in Washington DC after a day that brought a high of 70 degrees.

Record setting high temperatures were reported up and down the East Coast of the United Sunday (though not here in northern Vermont, that's for sure!)

Boston reported 74, degrees, which is the hottest tempeature on record for any January day there. Records keeping on this score started in Boston back in 1872.

Down in Washington DC it got up to 70 degrees on Sunday. After dark, temperatures slipped back to a stil-balmy 53 degrees.

At that point, when it was 53 degrees, the White House decided to release a tweet. It had a photo of what appeared to be snow falling around the White House, with a message, "First snow of the year!"

Obviously being Twitter, everybody piled on to that White House tweet.  They abandoned the beach, the outdoor barbecues or whatever to respond very unkindly. After all, it was the dumbest tweet anyone had seen in this young year of 2020.

"It's 52 degrees. It's snowing in DC to the same extent that Trump is innocent. These folks aren't even competent at lying," groused Neal Katyal, (@Neal_Katyal)  a Supreme Court attorney.

"It was 70 degrees in DC. WTF is wrong with these people. They literally lie about the dumbest things," Tweeted Josh Kail (@THATJoshKail).

To be fair, the response to the strange White House tweet was maybe, well, unfair.

 It did snow in Washington DC last Tuesday, so it's possible the White House meant to post its snow message then, but more important things, like the Iran crisis got in the way.  It was probably a draft Tweet that was accidently published.  The photo in the tweet was indeed taken this past January 7, when it was for sure snowing in Washington.  That January 7 snow was the first of the season in Washington.

However, the Trump administration has certainly had a, um, problematic, relationship with meteorology and the truth. He lied about the rain at his inauguration.  And then, we have the famous hurricane Sharpie incident.

You remember that. Last year, Trump mistakenly said that Alabama was one of the state's being threatened by Hurricane Dorian.  Rather than just correcting a simple mistake he made about Alabama and Dorian, Trump doubled down.

As Alabama meteorologists tried to calm the state's residents by assuring them Hurricane Dorian would miss that state, he insisted he was right. He even added some embellishments to a hurricane forecast map with a Sharpie in a sad attempt to make it look like Alabama was indeed threatened.

I think more people would have ignored the White House's "snow" on Sunday had the Trump administration, especially Trump himself, been a more honest person in general.

But that ain't ever going to happen, is it?

Karen Flounders And For Some Reason, Social Media Loves It

Sadly, Tropical Storm Karen never did get to talk to the manager
before dissipating Friday.

As readers of this blog know, there was a tropical storm named Karen earlier this week not far from Puerto Rico.

In the past couple of days, Tropical Storm Karen dissipated, and the internet loved it.

For those not familiar why this was so hilarious:  A fictitious woman named Karen is an internet meme, and in some respects, Tropical Storm Karen acted like her namesake.

Here's how Wired describes our meme heroine Karen:

"Karen has been the internet's stock female antagonist: A righteously annoyed middle-age white woman who loves coupons, reverse mullet bobs, and, above all else, speaking with the manager."

Yeah, you know the type.

As HuffPost reports, our fictitious Karen is pretty hapless, and so was Tropical Storm Karen. Which means weather geeks and others couldn't resist.

People on Friday  really jumped on what was meant to be just a serious, normal update from Joel Franco (@OfficialJoelF): "Karen is a tropical depression and could fall apart 'at any time,' according to the NHC. Not expected to get very far."

You can guess now that went. Karen is not going to get anywhere with the manager, and she's going to have a meltdown because of it

Here's a classic response from @LoveLolaHeart:

"Makes me a little sad, I was kind of rooting for Karen. I thought maybe she would make it rain Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and I could use some new pillowcases tbh. I think it would be nice if store managers could honor her memory with a 'Ma'am'"


I still worry that managers everywhere might still feel the wrath of Karen: "Every manager in harm's way, lock your doors now!" one person warned on social media.

Meanwhile, I noticed yesterday that Hurricane Lorenzo was keeping its distance from Karen on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. True to his rather studmuffin name, Lorenzo was the strongest hurricane on record yesterday for a storm in the far eastern Atlantic.

I could we why he was so far away from Karen.  Karen really isn't Lorenzo's type.

Trump's Climate Tweet Is Ignorance Again. Or Just More Gaslighting

Yes, it's cold this week in eastern North America (blue shading)
But it's warm in much of the rest of the world (orange).
Donald Trunp would have you scoff that the northeastern
U.S. cold disproves climate change. Don't believe it
He's either dumb, lying or gaslighting. 

Yes, I'm partisan, but I just have to comment on yet another Donald Trump tweet.

Last night he said on Twitter: "Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?"

I'm not sure why Trump is obsessed with improperly placed capital letters but I'll leave the argument for another day, or just call the grammar police.

He's done this kind of false climate tweet before but it still irks me.

For the record: Yes, anybody who steps outside this morning and the rest of today anywhere in the Northeast knows it's friggin' cold outside. Awful.  Some record low temperatures for the date will be set, if they haven't been set already.

I'm in Rutland, Vermont this morning and the temperature as I write this is 1 below zero. Being originally from Rutland, I don't remember the last time it was below zero this early in the season.

So yes, it's quite a cold wave. But no. ALL RECORDS, as Trump put it, won't be shattered.  There have certainly been worse cold spells than today's. This is not an extended "Cold Blast." It started yesterday evening and will be over with by Friday night. That's a  pretty brief cold spell, all things considered.

Most importantly, and we have to say this over and over again: A cold spell in one corner of the world tells us absolutely nothing about global warming, one way or another. I think even the most ardent ciimate change skeptics would tell you that. So would so-called climate change alarmists.

The immediate cause of this cold snap is a well placed, sharp southward dip in the jet stream. Most often, cold waves come down from Canada across the northern Great Plains then move eastward. The air warms up a little bit by the time it gets to the Northeast. That means places like here in Vermont get cold, but not unreasonably so.

This time, the jet stream aligned so that we got a straight shot of Arctic air coming down from near the North Pole, then across snow- covered Quebec and Ontario and down on us. There wasn't really time for the air to modify on its trip south.

The air had even less time to get warmer than it otherwise would because strong winds between high pressure in Ontario and western Quebec and low pressure in eastern Quebec propelled the bitter air quickly down on New England.

As for why the jet stream and other weather systems aligned themselves this way to give us this cold shot, who knows? I suppose one could make an argument that climate change is making the jet stream screwy, creating extreme weather events like this cold wave. But I have no way of knowing that.

Likely, this cold wave is just a random,  chance event. A fluke. Climate change doesn't cancel out a lot of the natural variability of weather. Remember, weather is akin to a person's mood.  Climate is like a guy or gal's personality.

A mood, and weather is transitory. Climate, and personality are a long term thing.

If this cold wave is a sign that there's an absense of global warming, as Trump suggests, how do you explain the record heat that gripped the Northeast this past July? Again, a heat wave in one corner of the world does not tell you much about climate change.

But by Trump's logic, there must have been intense global warming last summer, but a new ice age now in November. See?  He's making absolutely no sense.

By the way, as we shiver here in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, much of the world is pretty warm this week. As the map above in this post shows,  forecasts for the current week we're in does show some pretty cold air over the eastern half of Canada and the northeastern United States.

It also shows it to be vaguely chilly in central South America and in a few areas of Europe. But look at all the orange, which signifies above normal temperatures. The majority of places are quite warm, including western North America, most of Africa and Asia, Antarctica and the Arctic, particularly Greenland.

One week in one year of the world's weather doesn't prove or disprove climate change either. But at least by taking the whole globe into account, it shows that what happens in the Northeastern United States doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

I suspect Trump knows all this. He's gaslighting us again, because that's what he does. He sows doubt and division and makes us question reality by inventing "alternative realities"

We really just need to keep relying on the experts and let them inform us. Question the experts, yes. Challenge them. Ask for evidence. Don't take them at their word. But if there's a convincing argument, like there is from the scientists on climate change, we need to pay attention.

The world might depend on it. Meanwhile, somebody really needs to hide Donald Trump's phone.

Nope, Hurricane Center Was Not Trolling President With Tropical Storm Don

Tropical Storm Don fizzled, but that's not a slam
against Donald Trump.

Some people make a lot of connections that aren't there.

Take the late, not so great Tropical Storm Don.  

As noted here, it formed Monday. Yesterday, the National Hurricane Center accurately described Tropical Storm Don as "small" and "not particularly well organized."

Which to many people meant that the National Hurricane Center intentionally named a wimpy storm Don to troll the president and then poke fun at him when the storm did not turn into a big monster.

Tropical Storm Don, by the way, has fizzled out as expected. 

The tweet storms involving the tropical storm and the president will probably continue full force for God knows how long.

Here are the facts: The World Meteorological Organization has committees that come up with the names of tropical systems all over the world, including in the Atlantic basin.

The same tropical storm and hurricane names rotate through, so you get the same names every five years. They come in alphabetical order. Don's first letter starts with "D, " the fourth letter in the alphabet.  It was the fourth tropical storm in the Atlantic this year.

Even though you normally get the same hurricane name every five years, the names of particularly destructive and memorable hurricanes are retired and replaced with new names. That's why you'll never see a Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy again.

Here's how Don got on the list: In 2005, Hurricane Dennis trashed the Florida panhandle. Dennis was then retired as a name. According to the Associated Press, because Dennis was an English male name, the World Meteorological Society allowed the United States to replace Dennis with another English male name.

Don was chosen. Max Mayfield, the former director of the National Hurricane Center, said nobody had anybody particular in mind when Don was chosen.

By the way, there have been other presidential hurricanes. In 1997, when Bill Clinton was president, there was a Hurricane Bill, which didn't amount to much and stayed far out to sea.

By the way, if the list of tropical storms gets up to the letter "H" in the eastern Pacific, it would become Tropical Storm or Hurricane Hilary.

So we would have been screwed on Twitter no matter who got elected president last November.

Some of the jokes on Twitter about this whole situation were kind of funny, though.

One tweet informed us: "Tropical Storm Don as formed in the Atlantic Ocean and we're predicting it will be spending some time at a NJ golf club by the weekend."

"Tropical Storm Don will tell you how much damage it will do and then fizzle out and blame Hurricane Hillary," said another tweet.

The bottom line is, some people might think President Trump is small and not well organized, but the fact that Tropical Storm Don had those characteristics was coincidental.

My Favorite New Word "Factivsm" Saving Science Under Trump

In recent days, signs point to scientists really ramping up
"factivism" to counter the Trump administration's climate denial.

You might have heard of the daring social media manager for the Badlands National Park, who in a welcome fit of resistance on Tuesday, tweeted out a series of facts about climate change.

The people at Badlands did this to protest the Trump administration's apparent silencing of science - and facts- to suit what is more comfortable for him anyway, Trump's "alternative fact" universe.

Trump is no fan of climate science, having famously called that very climate science a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese and others to thwart United States economic development.

Or something.

Since taking office less than a week ago, Trump's administration has ordered employees at the Environmental Protection Agency to not discuss a new freeze on grant funding and told personnel at the U.S. Department of Agriculture from releasing research documents.

And, famously, the Trumpsters at least temporarily told the National Park Service from tweeting photos of the crowd size at Trump's inauguration because it depicted crowds smaller than in the president's fantasy world.

All these agencies deal with climate change a bit, and these gag orders were all too much for somebody at the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

So they tweeted the following on Monday:

"Flipside  of the atmosphere: Ocean acidity has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution. "Ocean Acidification #climate #carboncycle." 

And tbis: "Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years #climate."

AND this: "The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of of December, 2016, 404.93 ppm."

These three statements are just Climate 101, something any serious student of climate change knows.

But these facts, tweeted in apparent defiance of Trump, are a form of resistance that has been dubbed "factivism"   It's the act of combating Trump and his minions and their alternative reality with facts.

I really like this. Especially when it comes to climate change, when there's so much science going on in that field and so much temptation to silence the science among the climate deniers in the White House and elsewhere.

As New York Magazine points out, the Badlands tweets from Tuesday are only a minor form of insult to the Trump administration. But Trump can't bear even minor insults and if there's multiple cases of factivism going on, that could be a real weapon against Trump's fight against the climate change fight.

The Badlands Twitter account was silenced after this, and whoever tweeted those climate facts will probably be fired. (Though I'm not too worried about him or her, I bet there's a lot of science organizations that need a good social media communicator like that person.)

The famoust Badlands tweets have been deleted, but so many people saved screenshots of them that they are still being widely distributed 24 hours later.

All kinds of other factivsm resistance organizations, media and efforts have cropped up even before Trump was inaugurated, and that has accelerated in the past week.

In an apparent response to Tuesday's Badlands tweets, another Twitter account, @AltNatParkSer bills itself as the "unofficial "resistance" team of U.S. National Park Service.

By midafternoon eastern time Wednesday, @AltNatParkSer had accumulated 535,000 followers, including me. Two hours later, it was up to 608,000 followers.

Some of @AltNatParkSer Tweets poke mean fun at President Trump to try to get under his skin, like this one: "Reports of an unidentified orange haired mammal close to President's Park. Possibly invasive species. DC animal services have been notified."

Some bring up science: "The @USGS has a full list of US agencies running climate change programmes. Could they all be wrong, Mr. President?"

Other tweets note the admittably scary thing the people behind the account are doing: "This account should not have to exist & we are sorry for any problems we are causing our colleagues. But we didn't start this."

But they will continue, and the effort seems to be spreading.

There's a movement to organize a Scientists March On Washington, modeled after the highly successful Women's Marches last weekend.

I doubt 500,000 scientists will descend on Washington, but you never know.

There's also a move to get more scientists to run for public office, and encourage people to support those politician/scientists.

The organization is called 314 Action, and it's kinda modeled after Emily's List, the group that encourages women to run for office and others to support them.

Climate scientists, and any other scientist for that matter, are also being directed to an internet archive site where they can save climate change web pages and data before the Trump administration scrubs it away from U.S. government sites.

There's a lot of talk about resistance to Donald Trump. Trump, meanwhile, appears not to want the public to know the true facts about climate change, or practically anything else for that matter.

Scienced are taking on the unlikely role of resisting the Trump administration's climate denial. These scientists might turn out to be our most important factivists.

Hurricane Hermine? So Far, Pffft! So Much For The Hype. At Least For Now

Those little patche of thunderstorms near
Cuba and south of the Bahamas was supposed to
be a nasty hurricane or tropical storm, the
hype went. But not so.
That bigger patch of clouds on the right side
of the satellite pic is Tropical Storm Gaston,
which is not a threat to the United States.   

For the past week or more, some of us weather nerds on Twitter and elsewhere on social media have been hyping the idea of a big hurricane hitting Florida by this weekend.

I wasn't one of of the hypsters because I knew long range hurricane forecasts were iffy at best.

So do many meteorologists. The saner heads were saying wait and see, and if it gets to the point where we should be alarmed, we'll let you know.

Meanwhile, just chill.

So, this morning the thing that's headed toward Florida is --- not much at all.

The would-be Hurricane Hermine is just a disorganized patch of thunderstorms heading into the Bahamas. No Category 3 or 4 winds, no massive storm surge, just..... unpleasant weather.

That's not to say we should all just completely relax. The weather disturbance, such as it is, could still cause flooding in the Bahamas and Florida. Thunderstorms around this disturbance did start to increase in size and intensity late this morning, so it might be trying again to form into something, we'll see.

(It does look a bit healthier as of noon than the pic in this post from early this morning.)

Plus, the National Hurricane Center says this disturbance will probably eventually make its way to the Gulf of Mexico, where it still could develop into a tropical storm or even hurricane, since atmospheric conditions might be a little better to allow a tropical storm to get going.

It's something we'll have to watch, but no panic yet.

 I'm also a little disappointed on my Twitter feed this morning that there's an air of disappointment and frustration that this thing, the Non-Hermine, is so lame.

I thought it was good news. A tropical storm or hurricane threat that so far has not materialized. We should all be happy that Miami is not being blown away and drowned.

Us weather geeks love our atmospheric excitement, I'll give you that. But let's not actually hope for a destructive storm.

I hope Non-Hermine continues to choke and fizzle and sputter and die as it heads toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Bill Nye And I Had A Disagreement

I'm glad Bill Nye is an advocate against climate change
but not all weather events are caused by global warming.  

I like Bill Nye.

I also like the fact that he's sounding alarm bells on climate change. It is something to worry about, as  rising seas and increasingly erratic weather threaten the well being of so many people now, and especially in the future.

However, sounding the wrong alarm bells can backfire, as it did yesterday.

Nye posted an image of a television screen with CBS This Morning that showed an image of a tornado marauding through a Kentucky town on Tuesday.

Nye's accompanying Tweet read, "More severe weather. More suffering. More expense. Let's all take climate change seriously."

The implication was that Monday and Tuesday's United States tornado outbreak was at least influenced by global warming.

Perhaps a little, who knows? But I Tweeted back at Nye and said (with abbreviations cleaned up here)

"I agree with your stance on global warming, but tornado outbreaks like this one, though tragic, are normal this time of year."

Which is true.  Outbreaks like the one this week happen almost every year, regrettably. This one killed at least two people and destroyed lots of homes and businesses. Definitely not a good thing.

But attributing a tornado outbreak, the kind that have always happened, to climate change is incredibly dicey, to put it mildly.

The reasons I objected to Nye is that his Tweet seemed factually incorrect and gave ammunition to the people who try to deny climate change.

Climate change activists are irrational alarmists goes the party line.

And sure enough, The Federalist, a conservative publication, weighed in with an article about Nye's Tweet.

The Federalist in an article titled "Bill Nye Is a Huckster" said snarkily:

"If people trusted global warming alarmists, they might function under the premise that severe weather events are something unique to this particular age. It was only the discovery of fossil fuels that forced man to wrestle with the terrifying hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and rain showers. Before the Fall of Man, it was San Diego for everyone all the time."

The thing is, certain weather events are getting more common as the planet warms. Other things aren't really changing, as far as we know. There doesn't seem to be any particular trend in the number of tornadoes.

But deadly heat waves, droughts, and extreme storms have increased in some regions, and that could e a sign of climate change.

No single weather event can conclusively be tied to climate change. But unlike the tornadoes this week, some disasters are consistent with what scientists say are the fingerprints of climate change.

Take Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, which was overrun by an extreme wildfire this month.

True, wildfires have consumed towns and cities before. On the same day as the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, a wildfire roared parts of Wisconsin and Michigan That Peshtigo Fire of 1871 killed an estimated 2,000 people.

That's a lot worse than Fort McMurray, isn't it?

However, a wildfire as extreme as the one in Fort McMurray, that early in the spring that far north in Canada, might be a symptom of climate change. A lot of factors came together to create that disaster, but climate change could well have been one of them.

Nye might have done better to cite Fort McMurray instead of a tornado in Kentucky.  Climate change denialists will always attack climate change activists for their "alarmism" So we need to be careful to be alarmed only by things that are really alarming.

Rationality is on the side of people advocating for confronting climate change and trying to do something about it. It's a lot better than bringing a snowball onto the U.S. Senate floor in the dead of winter to "prove" climate change doesn't exist.

I don't mean to dwell on a single Tweet by Bill Nye or attack him. I'm just using his Tweet to make a point.

Here's my thing: We shouldn't panic over climate change. We're not all going to die in three hours because the world has gotten so hot.

But we should rationally, and as quickly as possible, deal with it. Find alternatives to fossil fuel. Understand better how the world's climate and environment will change with a warming world so that we can deal with it.

Doing so will help us economically, competitively and morally. The following is a cliche, but still: Why should we hand over a world to our grandchildren that's worse than the one we have now?

We really don't need any more Fort McMurrays.

"Without Warning" Tornado News Teaser Spawns Twitter, Weather Geek Storm

This inaccuate NBC Nightly News teaser rightly
raised the hackles of many meteorologists. 

Yesterday, more tornadoes hit South Carolina and Georgia, a day after other twisters srruck Mississippi and Alabama.

Like most news organizations,  NBC Nightly News dutifully reported on these storms. They teased it with an image of an ugly big tornado with the words "Without Warning."

Here's the problem: The tornado that they pictured, and every tornado that struck the Southeast the past couple of days was preceded by a tornado warning from the National Weather Service.

The NWS did their job and warned everyone of the tornado danger to the best of their ability.  The proof is in the pudding: While there was widespread damage, nobody died in the tornadoes and there were only a few minor injuries.

Yeah,  many people saw the tornadoes coming and took cover. But the urgent National Weather Service tornado warnings also surely prompted people to seek shelter, and that saved lives.

The "without warning" news teaser on NBC raised my hackles, and that of a lot of other tornado watchers, weather geeks and people, like me, who have facts on their side and know the National Weather Service is not "always wrong" but almost always right.

Meteorologist Brandon Sullivan of Oklahoma City saw the NBC News "without warning" teaser and Tweeted, "Whom among my weather followers believe this to be true of yesterday's tornadoes?"

The answer: Not many.

But there was a lot of debate on how exercised we should get about what I believe is a misleading teaser and how we should respond to it.

In my view, the inaccurate "without warning" tornado teaser on NBC was largely about grabbing viewers and web hits. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO you understand.

I'm guessing that "without warning" is a way to grab eyeballs, viewers and web hits to the story.

I've been in journalism a long time. You want to grab readers. You want to get people to watch your reports, follow you. What's the point of producing news if nobody is paying attention to it?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling the story in a compelling, thoughtful way. In journalism, you must do that.

But you have to be accurate, though. The "without warning" teaser fails that test.

Which is too bad. I watched the actual complete NBC Nightly News segment on the tornadoes and storms and as far as I can tell he actual reporting was accurate. As you always want to do in journalism, NBC soundly captured the human element of the story by interviewing tornado victims.

Maybe the question is what do you mean by "without warning"

Operational meteorologist Matt Lanza in Houston Tweeted "'Without warning' can mean a lot of things beyond a forecast, but it's tough for us to accept that."

For instance, Lanza says, if you wake up tomorrow and your house is hit by a tornado, regardless of forecasts, the fact that your house was destroyed by the twister kind of came without warning, because a half hour before the tornado, you didn't know the home would be destroyed.

A bigger issue is how much of a lead time cancels out the meme that the tornado was without warning? You really can't issue a tornado warning for a very specific location unti you see signs of it on radar. Which means you only have a half hour lead time or less in most instances.

I don't think the public, or many in the news media, understand the scientific limits of how far in advance you can warn of dangerous weather, like tornadoes.

In this week's tornadoes, forecasters knew four or five days in advance that the area around Alabama faced the risk of twisters, but there was no way to tell which specific towns would be hit.

As Texas environmental scientist Tom Gill Tweeted: "Until we can tell them 'a tornado will hit 742 Evergreen Terrace at 1:56 p.m. Friday,' they'll say it was without warning."

The "without warning" meme you see in so many news media stories about extreme storms is also an annoying cliche. When you can't think of an interesting way to tell a news story under deadline, you resort to these tired old phrases.

This dilutes the accuracy of news media accounts of storms.

Which frustrates a lot of people, including Dr. Marshall Shepherd. He knows a lot about the intersection of weather forecasting and media, since, among many other things, he is a meteorologist, hosts The Weather Channel's "WxGeeks" show, and writes about weather and media for Forbes.

His Tweets about the NBC Nightly News report showed his, and our exasperation. Shepherd Tweeted:  "Major media, PLEASE refrain from Knee Jerk, 'Without Warning" stuff about tornadoes. It is Sloppy reporting. Weather community beyond that"

Shepherd also highlighted the sad irony behind the news media slavishly reporting on a rodent's  Groundog Day long term forecast for the rest of the winter while seemingly dismissing meteorologists' tornado warnings as inadequate.

One of the meteorologists who accurately warned the public in advance of the tornadoes this week is James Spann of Alabama, who sighed, "I am really getting tired of these nitwits."

If you really need convincing that meteorologists' warnings are actually quite good and save many lives, watch this video of Mike Smith discussing the issue at a recent American Meteorological Society gathering.

Smith cites example of example of how the National Weather Service, private weather companies like AccuWeather and television meteorologists have saved countless lives with their timely tornado warnings.

All this is not to say we let any meteorologist off the hook. If the National Weather Service, television or private meteorologists fall short, through incompetence, circumstances beyone their control or any other reason, we DO need to hold them accountable and find ways to improve forecasts and weather warnings.

In fact, I can think of several meteorological shortcomings that need to be addressed. Examples include short staffing and equipment failures at the National Weather Service, and social media weather enthusiasts who promote hysterical hype rather than fact based forecasts. 

I honestly don't know how we stop the news media from inaccurately portraying meteorologists as not providing warnings. I guess the only thing to do is, every time this sort of thing comes up, complain loudly but rationally to the media outlet in question.

Which is why I was so glad there was such a Twitter storm over NBC Nightly News' "no warning" bullcrap about this week's southeastern United States tornadoes.

I hope they're listening and taking this to heart.

The People Who Shoveled The Boston Marathon Finish Line

The now infamous photo, probably of Chris Laudani,
shoveling snow away from the Boston Marathon Finish Line.  

There's always sub-stories to major news events, like the New England blizzard this week, and the people who shoveled the Boston Marathon finish line seems to be one of them.

I put a photo of one of the shovelers in this morning's post about the blizzard and forecasts for more snow.

Meanwhile, other media was sleuthing around, looking for the person or person shoveling the finish line. It turns out it was persons.

It started with a photo taken during the blizzard by Philip Hillman, from a window several floors above Bolyston Street in the Charlesmark Hotel, right above the finish line.

The photo showed somebody shoveling, the photo went viral on social media under the hashtag #whoshoveledthefinishline. The Boston Police Department even got in on the act, trying to figure out who the mad shoveler was.

One of them turned out to be Chris Laudani, a bartender at the Back Bay Social Club, says Boston Magazine.

"I only did it to send a message... I love the Boston Marathon and everything it stands for. The finish line doesn't deserve to be covered in snow."

On its Twitter Feed, Ironman Triathlon noted Laudani is a triathlete, having done rather well in the 2013 Lake Placid Ironman, so he clearly has an affinity for athletes like those who run the Boston Marathon.

There are at least two finish line shovelers, says Mashable, citing photographic evidence of one guy in dark pants, another in khakis.

I'm sure the Internet will sniff that person out, too.

Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post another trend has seized Boston and surrounding blizzard-socked areas. Its Twitter hashtag is #BostonBlizzardChallenge, and involves teens stripping to their underwear and diving into the two or three foot deep snows.

Kids these days.

National Hurricane Center Like Many of Us: Hot On Twitter, Cool To Facebook

If you live in any hurricane prone area of the nation this year and want immediate updates if a storm threatens, go to Twitter, not Facebook.  

Sorry, Facebook.  Hurricane forecasters say if you
want quick storm updates go to Twitter.  

That's the message direct from the National Hurricane Center. It turns out the hurricane center has the same frustration with Facebook that I and many others have.

Facebook's algorithms decide what they think is most relevant to what you want to read, and not necessarily a nice chronilogical feed of information onto your Facebook page.

That's nice for advertisers who want to target their marketing to you and whoever else is looking at Facebook.

It's not so nice if you are looking for immediate news updates. To me, the most relevant information of the day is whether a hurricane is going to wash my house away in an hour; updates on Justin Bieber's antics are not so important but what do I know?

Anyway, the National Hurricane Center says if you must use social media to get updates on storms they're tracking, go to Twitter. Your feed is usually at least somewhat in chronological order.

Hell, I often go to Twitter to see about breaking news, so that makes total sense to me.

National Hurricane Center updates that pop up on Twitter will direct you to their home page for more information.

It's probably just as well to just keep their page in mind if a hurricane or tropical storm is on its way.

Meteorologists and weather forecasters who focus on a wide variety of severe weather warnings also say Twitter has become more valuable than Facebook to issue alerts.