Nine days from now, on December 21st, one of Ireland’s great annual events will take place. Television cameras will assemble. Reporters will flock to the scene. A select few people, having waited years for tickets, will get to be there in person. And then, as ever, the RTE news will report at lunchtime that cloud sadly obscured the hopes of all the people gathered in the Newgrange passage tomb to see the Sun hitting the roofbox and flooding the chamber with light.
We are nine days away from the shortest day of the year. The temperatures this week, in the literal depths of winter, are likely to touch – be careful you don’t faint, now – minus five degrees centigrade.
This was the scene, yesterday morning, presumably in an emergency bunker prepared in case of nuclear apocalypse, somewhere in Dublin:
The National Emergency Coordination Group has just convened with Minister @DarraghOBrienTD
See @MetEireann for latest weather warnings. For info and advice on winter preparedness, see https://t.co/BDmj1ZG2Nf #BeWinterReady pic.twitter.com/ixuMeAhRi2
— Office of Emergency Planning (@emergencyIE) December 11, 2022
Ireland’s previous yellow weather warning has been upgraded, at the time of writing, to a status orange. Perhaps by the time you are reading, we’ll be in a full status red.
Here is the image on the RTE Weather page, again, at the time of writing:
One of the things about a weather warning system is that it can be genuinely useful: If it is used correctly, and applied correctly, then it can be of real use to the public in terms of being aware of genuinely unusual and potentially dangerous weather.
One of the downsides to how Ireland employs weather warnings, though, is that it is nigh on impossible to take them seriously. In this case, for example, “Orange Weather Warning” seems to mean “it will be cold and frosty in December”. And over the last few years, “Red Weather Warning” hasn’t meant “the roof might come off your house” so much as it has meant “take in the trampolines and don’t put any sheets on the washing line”.
If there ever is a weather system that threatens to cause serious and widespread risk to life, we’ll need a new name for it. Because Irish people are just not going to take the existing system seriously.
What is the impulse for all the warnings and emergency meetings and colour-coding the thermostat? A few things, I think: The first being simple vanity. Meteorologists are celebrities now, in their own right – and that celebrity has increased notably since they started doing things like giving every gust of wind a name like “Storm Eric” and going on the news to announce that they are upgrading their warning from yellow to orange.
Second: Climate Change. One of the great weaknesses of climate change analysis, at least in the general population, is recency bias: The climate shifts over hundreds of years, we live for less than ninety on average. We also tend to remember last year’s weather better than we recall the weather decades ago. And so, all these named storms and weather warnings are very effective at convincing you that the weather has shifted dramatically in recent years, and for the worse. The chances are we had just as many “storms” in your youth, but nobody bothered giving them names, or a colour code.
Third: Mammyism. There’s a phrase used in the rest of the English speaking world – “nanny state”. In Ireland, we have more of a “mammy state”. The basic idea here is that you, a normal member of the public, are a child who does not know how to behave without state guidance in everything. We need a yellow warning for the weather, you see, because you might not know to turn on the heating without the nice lady on the radio telling you it’s okay to do it.
This evolving “permission structure” is one of the more concerning things about Irish society. One person I know, a relatively sensible and successful person, remarked last week that “you wouldn’t feel guilty turning up the heating with conditions this extreme”
This extreme? Feel guilt? It’s cold in December, my friend. This is why you have a heating system!
Nevertheless, this person almost seemed to feel that they needed permission from the rest of society to do a perfectly normal thing, like putting on their domestic heating.
No good, in my opinion, comes from all of this. It is cold, and it is December. The winter, in fact, has been very mild to date. The idea that we need emergency meetings and colour coded warnings and meteorologists on every news bulletin is nuts. And it is doing no good at all for our national mental health, long term.