Fake weather

November 28, 2017

There really is no limit to the rise and pervasiveness of Fake News.

Today (Tuesday) I saw a story in Zero Hedge — a blog that I follow closely and that takes stuff from many sources, many of them dubious, dangerous or just plain loony — that the UK was about to be engulfed in a bout of freezing weather that could extend for as long as three weeks.

This is of direct and immediate concern to me, because I am scheduled to go to London next week. I have therefore followed the weather forecast for the UK and it has been pretty normal for this time of year: dull, chilly, some rain, but not very cold or very anything.

Granted, this item was from a blogger and site whom I know to be extremist, unreliable and generally suspicious. On the other hand, it’s only the weather, right? he hasn’t got an agenda with the weather, surely?

So I checked several mainstream weather sites, as well as the ones he cited. The former were expecting the kind of normal weather I had read about, the latter were in a different planet or universe.

We shall see soon enough, but I expect the mainstream weather forecast to be proven correct and the radical, anti-Establishment one to be proven wrong. That will be a relief, but there is a wider lesson:

You can no longer take at face value anything you read, see or hear, in any media outlet. You have to have knowledge — preferably from personal experience/ exposure, or at least from reliable second-hand sources — about both the outlet and the specific person.

Nothing is sufficiently innocent to be considered beyond distortion — often deliberate. Why anyone should lie about the weather forecast is an interesting question, but more important is the fact that they do.

That’s what it’s come to, and it’s still getting worse.