Weather warnings? Tell people the risks but let them make their own minds up

In the past few days, we’ve had Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, and your assessment of how quaint or ridiculous those names are for weather that led to the Met Office warning of significant damage to property, travel disruption and potential threat to life probably depends on where you live, and how badly it got hit.

In quite a few places, it’s been pretty forceful, and those who’ve been lucky enough to get off lightly should bear in mind that at least three people have been killed and more than 1.4 million homes left without power. The most serious damage, as so often seems to be the case in Britain, may have come from flooding, rather than the wind, especially in the north of England. (My daughters, who live in Yorkshire, sent me quite alarming pictures of river levels there.)

Fortunately, however, this triple whammy of bad weather wasn’t in the same league as the great storm of 1987, which killed 18 people, uprooted 15 million trees, and caused £1 billion-worth of damage, back when that was a lot of money, rather than the cost of Covid testing for a fortnight. But you can see the bind it creates for the forecasters.

The Met Office got slated back then, because it failed to predict how bad the storm would be. Michael Fish airily – if that’s the word – laughed off the idea it was going to be anything like a hurricane (which it technically, just, wasn’t, though anyone who remembers it will tell you that it wasn’t easy to tell the difference). Perhaps as a result of this, they’re now very diligent about spelling out potential risks, with the result that people lucky enough to escape the worst of the weather get to ask what all the fuss was about.

After all, there’s not much point in forecasting if it doesn’t make public the information that potentially dangerous weather is on the way. And forecasting is much better than it was then, thanks to satellites and computer modelling. Like other predictions (the spread of Covid; the likelihood of recessions), though, it’s a far from precise or reliable science. Last Wednesday, for instance, ScotRail stopped services at 4pm as Storm Dudley approached, perhaps prematurely.

Curiously, the science for climate is more solid, and creates more consensus, than for weather; we can be surer of very long-term, global trends deduced from geology than whether it’s going to rain at the weekend. All the data about “worst storm”, “wettest spring”, “driest August” for decades or centuries is measured against a fairly small set “since records began”, compared with assessing centuries of glacier decline, or drilling holes in millennia worth of permafrost.

Still, forecasting is the Met Office’s job. And it has the hazard that almost all jobs that involve assessing risk do: the big risk is when things turn out worse than they anticipated – something that Mr Fish found out 35 years ago, and that has preoccupied people looking at the excessively pessimistic predictions of the likes of Professor Neil “Lockdown” Ferguson. The trouble is that those looking at possible costs and benefits, entirely understandably, are often doing so only for their own area of expertise.

Which is fair enough. The Met Office is a weather forecaster, not someone who has to run a private business. Professor Ferguson is a mathematical biologist, not an expert on the financial costs attendant on shutting down the economy.

But it means that, too often, we’re not getting told all the real risks involved in the action being proposed, and we’re also – again, for understandable reasons – often getting a more cautious assessment of danger than the most likely scenario.

You would think, for example, from coverage of weather events, that they were becoming more serious and dangerous. But the global total of deaths from natural disasters (including weather) has been falling sharply for most of the past century; in 1921, they caused around 1.2 million; in 2019, the figure was 11,755. In the late 1920s and early 1930s that figure was sometimes more than 3 million, but since the mid-80s it’s only once (2010) risen above 250,000.

No one wants to be complacent about what are still a lot of human tragedies, but those figures suggest we’re getting much better at predicting dangerous events like severe weather, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and at mitigating their effect when they do happen. But trying to maximise safety, as we have discovered during the pandemic, is not cost free.

We already accept this in all sorts of other areas. You could (in theory) save 1.3 million lives around the world every year by banning motor vehicles, but of course you would also endanger quite a lot of people’s lives (no ambulances, or food delivery by road) and livelihoods. The UK accepted tens of thousands of flu deaths as the norm in recent years – though I don’t say that to downplay the huge additional danger posed by Covid, but merely to point out that, like cancer or heart disease, there are plenty of health hazards that we would like to be able to prevent, but where there are limits to what we can do.

When we shut down public transport, or advise people to work from home, those decisions have significant costs, whether the reason for them is Covid or a storm, and no matter whether the basis for the decision is the only sensible choice or excessively cautious.

Scientific advances, technological innovation, improved information, global trade and other aspects of human ingenuity have made the world safer, but none of them can eradicate every conceivable risk. And neither agencies nor governments, to put it mildly, have a record of calling those judgments perfectly.

In the end, the only sane course of action is, as often as possible, to inform people of the risks, but let them make their own minds up and accept the consequences – whether that’s fatty foods or going out in bad weather.