Apologies for the extraordinarily long delay since I posted last: everything takes longer that you expect, and that’s certainly been true about moving to — and settling into — Winnipeg.
Hopefully, I’ll pull up my socks.
Today, something about the way seeing is believing — or, more accurately, how not seeing has come to be not believing.
Twice since I’ve been in Manitoba, I’ve gotten an emergency alert of a tornado warning on my cellphone.
Once, a few weeks ago, just after I’d taken photos of a startlingly ominous grey wall of cloud and rain near Neepawa, about an hour and a half outside of Winnipeg. It was easy to believe that that the oncoming storm could be curling itself into a tornado: the sheer malevolence of its darkness and deep bruise colours had all the foreshadowing of a movie.
Then again yesterday, a similar scene started to unfold as we headed north from my office.
No sooner had we noticed a tornado watch on the Environment Canada weather site than we saw storm clouds piling into the sky — not the whole sky, just a growing portion of it. When we got to the regional municipality of St. Andrews, just outside Winnipeg’s borders to the north, the same cloud was taking up half the sky all the way to the horizon.
Then our cellphones started to buzz and chime with the unmistakable repeated tones of a public safety warning — a warning targeting to people whose cellphones were downwind of the growing storm
The cellphone warnings are an amazingly powerful public safety tool — the ability to tightly localized a warning about an immediate danger — but it’s not without its downsides, especially in the social media era.
As soon as the warning went out, there were people were suggesting on Twitter that it was an overreaction. “No sign of a storm here”, “Just sun in my neighbourhood…”
Not from where I was standing: there was no sign of a tornado cone, but the tight tower of the storm cell curling gently by us was purple-green and ominous, pea-sized hail clattering down mixed in amidst the heavy rain.
It was almost hypnotic to watch: partially because it was so different and potentially dangerous — though the storm had quickly moved past us — but also because everything was happening so fast. The wind in the core thunderstorm changed clouds in moments, to the point that it seemed as if everything had been artificially sped up, like the overhead weather satellite shots on television of hurricanes curling in towards Gulf of Mexico coastlines
.Could we believe it was dangerous? Absolutely — it still radiated sheer power even after it was well past us, and the storm did end up doing measurable damage to the east of us.
But the refusal of some to even believe that a risk existed was mind-boggling to me. What possible gain is there for someone to lie about the risks of a potential tornado?
There clearly isn’t anything to gain.
I put it down to something else.
Information is constantly filtered now by personal experience: every day, every hour, sometimes every minute, brings out someone saying that information is flat-out wrong because it doesn’t match their particular circumstances.
It’s pseudoscience with a sample size of one, or sometimes even none: I wish I had a nickel for every time I read about something that happened to an otherwise anonymous “friend of a friend of someone at work” or to some other person that had no name or address.
(And yes, I do know that bad things still do happen — that there are outliers where people can and do die from a reaction to a vaccines for example. The idea that individual deaths prove everyone else who is vaccinated is about to die is something else again.)
Should we question what we see and hear?
Absolutely. Informed, educated scepticism — especially at a time when anyone and everyone can post whatever fiction they like on the internet — is a valuable skill.
So is the ability to discern a legitimate source from the chaff.
But full-time denialism — particularly when undertaken for the fleeting thrill of some small passing internet fame — does great damage, even going so far as to put lives at risk.
Back soon, I hope.
Thank you for your patience.
Your tardiness is forgiven 👍
When I take the time to read your pieces I'm always glad I did. The photos are cool too.