The weather people are going absolutely apeshit about wind chill - so much so that sometimes they forget to tell you the actual air temperature. Moreover, one dipshit reporter on ABC News was so excited about the amazing wind chill extremes this week, he claimed that with a windchill of -43F (being reported somewhere in Iowa), your car’s antifreeze wouldn’t work. :smack:
For someone who works outside, yeah, knowing the wind chill temperature is probably useful. Me? I walk into my garage and get into my car - and that’s it. I’m out of the wind until I get to work, and then I dash 20 yards to the lobby door. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the wind chill, but I DO want to know the actual air temperature; that’s what matters to me when I’m sitting inside my car, where there’s no wind. And everyone wants to know whether their car will start, for which wind chill doesn’t fucking matter. So weather folks, stop fetishizing the goddam wind chill and start putting the actual air temp out there.
I saw some graphic the other day showing what happens at certain temperatures. It said at -40 gas doesn’t freely flow anymore. I worried for a second…then realized it’s not going to get anywhere near -40, it’s going to be -12. My car’s going to be okay.
Yesterday I was making a delivery (about 45 minutes away from where I work) and someone said “Joe, where are your gloves” and I said, what I always say in this whether “At home, I’m only outside for 30 seconds, my car takes 5 minutes to heat up and then [on this round trip] it’s 75 degrees in there for the hour and a half I’m driving, what do I need gloves for?”.
You need them for when something unexpected happens, like your car breaks down or you come upon the scene of an accident or something.
But for certain things I agree - I have a colleague at work who I see a couple times a month at a meeting in another building, which both of us have to walk outside to get to. In winter, she will inevitably be incredulous that I didn’t bring a coat for walking across a narrow courtyard. Now in weather like this (in Chicago) - fuck it, I’m not leaving the building except to go home, unless I have to, so I would wear a coat. But in normal cold winter weather for that short of a walk? Forget it.
Fortunately the local weather casters seem to understand wind chill enough to not be infatuated over these large negative numbers.
Years ago, when the meteorologists around here first started reporting this “new” phenomenon I misheard it as the “windshield” factor and had something to do with driving conditions.:smack:
Wind chill is an indicator but it is by no means accurate. It just ends up being for bragging rights. Wind Chill assumes naked flesh and few people go out into the winter unclothed.
This OP isn’t a rant about school closings but it is a rant about over-reaction to weather. And in the spirit of over-reacting to weather conditions, the local schoolboard, chose to close all schools today. It’s going to be sunny and 16F today. Currently clear, calm and 4F. The roads are dry and perfectly clear.
Oh, for fuck sakes you useless fuck-ton of bureaucratic wankers!
Even my kids are all, WTF?!
Not that they’re not happy to sleep in and have a day off. You know, after the stress of 16 days of holidays they’ve just been through. :rolleyes:
You’d be surprised how many people wear shorts. I flew from Dallas to Toronto last Friday and there was a kid with shorts on the plane. Granted, I laughed at him as he walked by, but still.
Yesterday wasn’t as cold as today but I did see one guy wearing shorts and a couple of catholic school girls in their skirts.
I understand the thinking behind “At home, I’m only outside for 30 seconds, my car takes 5 minutes to heat up and then [on this round trip] it’s 75 degrees in there for the hour and a half I’m driving, what do I need gloves for?” the problem isn’t your regular trip, it’s when you get stranded. Over a hundred people in Indiana have been pulled out of stranded cars these past couple days and some of them were on their way to freezing to death when they were found. Pretty sure most of them were on routine trips when they got stuck.
Even if you don’t normally wear gloves get a pair and keep them in your car for emergencies.
One of the things I’m doing today, seeing as my place of employment is closed due to the weather, is checking and updating my car emergency kits. Among other things I usually include gloves and extra socks. Wet feet in this weather are baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
That’s not really true, even fully dressed, given the same temperature, you’ll be much colder on a windy day than a calm day. Denim is porous, jackets and shirts that are somewhat baggy will have wind going down the the neck hole and across your chest etc. Even if the wind isn’t actually touching your skin, just having the air moving across your clothing is going to make you colder then if there was a still layer of air around you.
When you take the Motorcycle Safety Class there’s a section on dressing properly because even though it might not be that cold out, if you’re riding your bike at 40 or 50 or 60 MPH you’re going to create a wind chill for yourself…and most people aren’t riding their motorcycle naked. I had one friend tell me that he wears a pair of windbreakers under his jeans to stay warm if he’s going on the freeway and it’s getting cold out.
Windchill in Canada used to be calculated in watts. The higher the number, the more you had to take wind into consideration if you were going to be outside. A windchill factor of 2000 and above was dangerous. We all understood it, and nobody breathlessly told me it was -40 outside when it was really -20.
You don’t understand the need for school closures because you and your children happen to have common sense.
My lovely wife, who works for the local school district, tells me amazing stories of kids coming to school in shorts, t-shirts, short skirts, no jackets etc when the winter temps are at their worst. These aren’t underprivileged kids without proper clothes. Most come from middle to upper income families. They are too stupid to dress properly and their parents do not care enough to make them do so.
So while the school administrators understand that most students will be waiting at the bus stop properly dressed, they also realize that a stupidly large percentage of them will board the bus with frostbite and make it the schools problem when they arrive.
My husband is one of these who never wears a jacket. He’ll take one in the car for emergencies, but he says he doesn’t need it in the store and doesn’t want to carry it and it only takes a few minutes to walk inside from the parking lot.
We went to Walmart yesterday and he was just in a t-shirt while I had on two shirts and a jacket. We saw a guy inside the store wearing spandex bike shorts! :smack: Granted, we live in Georgia, but it was still in the teens.
For example, there’s tremendous focus on wind chill factor (aka “real feel” in certain circles) when the temperature gets very cold. But you never hear it reported about in the summer: “today’s high will be 92 but with the wind chill factor it will be only 81”. No, then they whip out the humidity to make things seem even hotter.
I understand what you’re getting at and you’re not wrong. The principal of the school sent an email yesterday (before the schoolboard decision to close) asking parents to make sure the kids were properly dressed for the weather and that “the school would ensure a quick transition into the building for all students” - whatever that means, I guess. These are high school students mind you. If they don’t have the sense to get out of the cold or dress appropriately, fuck them. And I don’t just mean that in an off-hand way. I really mean, let them fucking freeze their asses off the one time.
Explain this to me. We were kids. We had harsh winters. We were not impervious to cold? How did we manage to survive a cold winter without dying of exposure at the bus stop? The reason these kids are such morons is because they are coddled by everyone beyond what’s reasonable. It’s absurd. I object less to them missing a day of school than I do the fucking nannying by the school boards. As for the schools, for every kid who shows up in a pair of shorts, their parent should get a personal call from the school administrator reminding them to be responsible parents and teach their kids to dress appropriately.
Fuck the school boards, fuck the schools, fuck the irresponsible parents and fuck the dumbass kids who can’t dress themselves. Fuck the lot of them.
TV news cannot function without superlatives. Saying it’s 8 degrees is not a superlative and will attract no attention (= eyes for the advertising). Screaming that it’s 'leventy-eight below zero will draw that attention.
You really needed this explained? Or the solution of turning off the goddamn TV and looking up the weather on any of the base government sites that present the raw info without hype?
I’m in general sympathetic to your point of view, but it’s a very broad change in mindset beyond the ability of any one actor to change. There has been a very strong move to holding other people responsible for people’s failings.
This is reflected in a zillion lawsuits in which the premise is that even though the victim is partially at fault and should have known better or acted differently, someone else is also responsible because had they acted more diligently to protect the victim from his own irresponsibility they would have suffered less.
Any one individual or entity is powerless to buck this mindset.
I’m on a school board and I had an extensive discussion with our superintendent last night about this very issue. Right now it’s 19 degrees and the roads are clear. But at 6:30 in the morning we were estimating that it would be -7 with a wind chill taking it down to -20. We didn’t want kids waiting in that weather, especially because there would be a good portion insufficiently dressed for the weather. No coats or hats or gloves or all three means frostbite.
Couple that with a discussion about what % of students would show and what it would cost the school in a hit on state points. We made the call to cancel school.