Weather Officer Accountability

Quite possibly from our hopeless causes file, can I at least try and make a plea that we have a look at the economic damage done by the trigger-happy weather officers and the compliant clickbait media when it comes to storm warnings? Vaianu. was the latest and hopefully the reason I mentioned that is it's still fresh enough in our memories to remind us of a week's worth of hyperbole and headline nonsense that actually caused quite a lot of damage. I mentioned this briefly on the programme yesterday. Not storm damage, but economic damage. Spending in Northland as a result of all this noise was down 48%. Auckland 46%. Waikato 52%. That would have included the supercars, of course, in Waikato that got canned prematurely. Bay of Plenty down 68%. Gisborne 51%. Hawkes Bay 56%. Now, obviously in the middle of a storm, on that blowy old Saturday and Sunday, you've already worked out that you're not booking an outdoor table for lunch. But these figures will include the week building up to the event, the drama that started the previous Sunday with the ever-present keep an eye on this one headlines. And as the week progressed, the alarmism grew. Not because the alarmism was required. But because the weather wonks and the media feed off each other, the weather peeps love publicity and the media, especially digital, they love potential clickbait and nothing bites you click like pending meteorological carnage. So in that prior Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, how many things got cancelled? How many bookings got killed? How many trips binned? How many decisions altered? That's the economic damage we can avoid. If you remember. It wasn't until Friday afternoon they actually knew the weather, well they thought, what it would do. I mean, they were still wrong. But at least by Friday they had confidence in the ensuing days when so much of our potential economic activity got canned, they were still speculating on the Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, still speculating and blabbering on about trampolines and holiday travel and telling you how to live your life. Somewhere along the line, the weather people got carried away with their own self-importance. importance in the media, jeed them up, basically, in what is a two-day storm turned into a week-long extravaganza, an orgy of verbal diarrhoea amping and amping and amping, and as the data now shows, doing untold damage to regions that really didn't need it, as well as a storm. The forlorn hope from me this morning is that this data actually sobers a few people up and maybe just maybe next time a few grown-ups drive the narrative.