Grado de dificultad: 3 (Por el idioma)
Columnista: Roberto
It becomes difficult for nerds not to be involved in political controversies, these days.
Anyone who follows the US news has heard about the now-called “Sharpie Gate” saga.
A quick reminder:
POTUS (not a specialist in weather, or climate) wrongly understood, from a White House briefing, that Alabama was one of the areas impacted by Hurricane Dorian.
This triggered a wave of call from (scared) Alabama residents, to their local weather service.
This office (located in Birmingham – Alabama) had to react quickly, to avoid an unnecessary panic.
Their tweet become unintentionally famous:
Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx
— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) September 1, 2019
And things should have ended there.
No one knows exactly what happened in the White House.
It looks like POTUS (a twitter fan) felt humiliated by these nerds from the National Weather Service, then things escalated.
It was so serious, though that some “mole” within the NOAA felt compelled to issue the following message:
Who did that stunt (“a NOAA Spokeperson”)? For what exact reasons? It doesn’t matter much.
What counts is that it was a lie, a shameful one, driven by some political agenda (not scientific at all).
If you don’t belong to the scientific community, you may not realize the size of the outrage that it provoked.
It was an almost universal one:
Today the integrity of a great institution, @NOAA, was compromised to justify and pander an argument that never needed to happen. To say it’s a sad day in the weather communication enterprise would be an understatement. We stand with you @NWSBirmingham. pic.twitter.com/910JDydpWA
— Thomas Geboy (@ThomasGeboyWX) September 6, 2019
We all felt it as a betrayal, a very serious one.
It is, however, worse: that incompetent people are trying to rewrite reality, and we don’t understand why.
Some say it is only to avoid hurting the ego of one person, casually the one who wants Americans on the moon before 2024.
NASA should be scared (because they surely have moles in their entity).
We all should be. Today, 2 + 2 are still 4, maybe tomorrow someone will come to say that “2 + 2 are 5” and that “we are inconsistent with probabilities”.
Not funny, at all.
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