our '100 year epic storm' in ny was less than an inch in the 'state of emergency' upstate snow belt and a few inches in nyc. shut down the greatest city in the world for nothin, and before a single snowflake hit pavement. my gosh, what have we become? i grew up in a 'can do' country where we were taught to dominate fear. now we're becoming a fear based country that pretty much cant do a damned thing. i know, it was 'just a snowstorm', 'cept it wasnt. to me it was the new paradigm for how we don't/can't/incorrectly handle everything. and of course, since everyone defends and justifies their ridiculous antics, we also can no longer learn from our mistakes--seems nobody makes any! so we all just keep traveling down hill...i'm not enjoying the ride. are you?
They get the forecasts right a lot more than they get 'em wrong in recent years - I can think of one other really badly blown blizzard prediction in the 22+ years I've lived in the Mid-Atlantic / Northeast, and a couple of surprise storms that hit just the right odd set of temps and moisture to catch a lot of people by surprise with ice. One of those was just a couple of weeks ago and a lot of people died out on the roads and I'd MUCH rather have had a false positive prediction on that one with people staying home unnecessarily than the false negative one we did have. If NYC really had been hit with 2-3 feet of snow, all of the closings would have looked like the minimum they should have done, as was the case after Hurricane Sandy when they took a lot of precautions and in retrospect probably should have taken more. Or Katrina, where far too little was done in advance, which was fairly clear in the days leading up to the storm and catastrophically evident in the weeks following. So I'm fully comfortable with public officials taking precautions in the face of big storm forecasts - particularly given the increase in these types of extreme events in recent years. Even given the inevitability of the occasional forecast that turns out to be badly wrong.
I ski-bummed in a small Colorado mountain town in the very early 1980's, when meteorology was much more of an art and less of a science than it is today. Given the variability of mountain weather and the lack of resources available to the small local forecasters in towns like mine (never mind the lack of instant access to data anyone can get today), the success rate was probably closer to 1/3 right rather than the 95% plus success rate major forecasters generally have today. The weather guy at our one local radio station was a friend of mine - he worked the lifts too because he didn't get paid to do the weather. And fortunately his personality was well suited to taking the constant abuse he inevitably got from a town full of powder hounds who were disappointed far more often than not. The stakes for what can happen to a major city today are far greater than a false positive powder forecast in a small ski-town in 1981-82 - and I'm grateful for how often they get it right and for how prepared our civic leaders have gotten compared to even 10 years ago.
Also, don't forget that just because they missed the track by 50-75 miles (which isn't exactly a blown forecast, just one that's a few percentage points of) and parts of New York and Pennsylvania were spared, Boston is still getting nailed and a number of places are getting historic amounts of snow. Much better that stuff is closed and people stayed off the roads in eastern Long Island and much of New England. I'd say this forecast was much more of a success than failure...
So, yeah, I'm enjoying the ride - it's the only one I've got. And in my mid-50's, I'm not at all sure it's the rest of the world going downhill or if it's mostly me! Old guys like us have always been sour about the state of the world. FWIW, I've never wanted to "dominate fear" - I've wanted to base it on the best information available and not react irrationally to it, but there were things worth being afraid of and I had a few friends who didn't make it out of their early 20's for trying to dominate fear rather than using it prudently. I'd personally rather continue downhill slowly rather than all at once, whether personally or collectively...
-Ray