A few years ago, I was exposed to a what struck me as a radical idea.  The Chairman had declaimed the wind chill effect as complete bullshit.  He said that weathermen should not tell him how he feels but instead tell him the temperature.

At the time, I thought The Chairman to be wrong.  Although I distrusted and loathed weathermen, putting their predictive powers on par with that of divination from goat entrails, I figured that wind chill was a real thing.  It only made sense.  The windier it is, the colder it feels.  It might be imprecise but, surely, it’s just a simple calculation.

As later events illustrated, I was quite wrong.

A couple of years ago, I got one of those little weather things on my computer.  It sat on my desktop and told me what temperature it was.  It did not tell me the wind chill.

At first this worried me.  How would I know how cold it felt?  What if it was only minus ten outside but there was a strong wind making it feel like minus forty five?  I’d die of cold.  Or at least be cold while I waited to die of something else.

Then I noticed something.  The wind chill does not matter.   Wind or no wind, minus ten is actually cold.  At first I felt like a bit of a pussy.  When you go through life looking at sensationalist weather reports, the real thing makes you feel a bit soft.  I would not require a scarf when it was minus ten with a wind chill.  But when it was minus ten without a wind chill, I did.  Problem was, I always read the wind chill.

I had no idea what minus ten without it was.  Or that I required a scarf at minus three.

And I didn’t think anything below minus twenty was cold.

pic nicked from here

Now I know that Toronto almost never gets to minus twenty.  We just pretend it does because that makes us look like real big shots.  The rest of Canada, places where it can hit minus fifty without any wind, might think that we’re not such a bunch of whining little babies if we inflate our temperatures using a deeply questionable tool. [Read that link -- it's the article that brought all this on.]

I don’t mind feeling cold in minus ten and I don’t care what people who live in minus fifty might think about it.  What I don’t like is weathermen exaggerating the danger of the weather and inflating the numbers so that they can look important and we can feel tough.  Whether they do it with wind chill or humidex, it’s still bullshit.

Much like most reporting (DANGER DANGER TERRORISM!!!) their job is to relay the facts and not to concern themselves with how I feel.  They can’t measure that.

Yet . . .