No chance in Helene
On Buffett adages, Caribbean cloud formations, and gratitude for the science of meteorology and the people driven to make it better
Warren Buffett is credited with saying, "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." With Helene bearing down on America's Gulf Coast today, we ought to acknowledge a different flavor of Buffett's sentiment: Somebody evacuated safely from the path of a dangerous hurricane today because someone started collecting data and building a model a long time ago.
â– We should be astonished by the quality of the forecast models developed by teams at the National Weather Service and other meteorological organizations around the world, like Europe's ECMWF. They're able to foresee the genesis of a potentially catastrophic hurricane days in advance, when it looks like nothing but a small batch of clouds in the western Caribbean.
â– Meteorologists should be proud of themselves for having made such developments, and society should be thankful to our predecessors and our past selves for investing in a system of scientific development that has made so much progress. The advancements that sometimes look only incremental have compounding effects, and they don't happen by accident -- they happen through intentional efforts to get better in the name of saving lives and protecting property.
â– Other sciences ought to look to the example of meteorology for an example of how to drive a science toward ever-increasing maturity. The public should look to the field as an examplar for generating a responsible return on public investment.
â– We don't have the technology (at least not yet) to keep adverse weather from happening, and there's little reason to believe we ever will. But improving the quality of the science involved and communicating it well to mass audiences are two things our experts have shown their dedication to doing well.
