Weather: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I'd like to talk about the weather and I mean all of it the hots the wets the whooshes the burbs and of course the flashy flashy boom booms predicting the weather accurately is a multi-billion dollar industry that can affect businesses and literally save lives so there is a lot of pressure on weather forecasters which might explain why they sometimes snap I want you guys to say wow that's great news it's gonna be 60 on Friday well I mean want me to do put so many every day next time there's some wind here's some temperature 20s feels like 19 or feels like 70 I don't know 47 partly cloudy Southwest breeze 10 to 15 here's a 60 I don't know if that's good enough for you guys get excited maybe I'll disappoint you with the 7-day here a few minutes [Applause] obviously which all local news were still livid like that a gas station got robbed that's not my fault in traffic there should be no delays in getting you home to your sad lives and your dumpy ugly kids and in sports any athlete on any team could your spouse if they wanted to that's the news suck on this one sit on that one look maybe maybe you don't get your weather from local news maybe use an app like the one that came with your phone or dark sky or Weather Underground all from places like the Weather Channel or AccuWeather if you're a New Yorker you might even get your weather from New York ones Twitter account and if you don't you absolutely should because their actual forecast for the first of this month was October got off to a warm start today enjoy the month it's the last good one for NYC until May the rest of trash excellent wherever you get your weather from if you live in the u.s. your forecast would not exist without the National Weather Service it's a subset of its parent agency NOAA and it's an absolutely incredible government service generating essential information but unfortunately it may be under serious threat so tonight much like two colleagues in an elevator let's talk about the weather and and let's start with the fact the National Weather Service harvests a huge amount of data every day and all the other private Weather Service's you can possibly think of are dependent on that data to make their own predictions here's one National Weather Service meteorologists pointing exactly that out all the forecast warnings and data that's available from the National Weather Service is there free of charge to anyone even though you don't know our names or see our faces most of the time those products and services that you see almost every day likely originated from the National Weather Service office yeah and he's absolutely right think of it like this National Weather Service data is to a weather forecast what fresh Wolverine meat is to Hormel chili you can't make one without the other it's the dominant ingredient bear the National Weather Service also works in tandem with organizations all over the world through the World Meteorological Organization where countries share essential weather data on a free and unrestricted basis this actually works out very well for the US we receive three times more data back from our partners than we give them and we've really benefited from that in the past for instance in 2012 the US model initially had hurricane sandy heading out to the ocean while the European model showed it making a sharp left turn and hitting the east coast which it did of course it did and because we had that early warning countless lives were saved so virtually the entire world participates in a weather observation system that most people have never heard of and that private companies benefit greatly from which is not to say the companies don't add value here because they definitely do among other things when a local news station subscribes to say a key weather it gets there state-of-the-art graphics packages that's something that's been a big part of their brand since at least the whatever you need AccuWeather has it [Music] every day you can select from thousands of award-winning graphics satellite and radar images graphics that are at the cutting edge of design and accuracy you'll know about the worst one like this nasty Christmas Eve in Bradford Pennsylvania or this blizzard in lonetree Wyoming trivia questions can help hold your audience with tantalizing facts when the weather is in the news you can be on top of it with special graphics like this one of trinova whoa functionable graphic Accuweather that looks like a screenshot from the world's saddest Nintendo game where the levels you progress through a stages one two three and four cancer and and to this day the private sector is on the cutting edge of dressing up weather data one of a key weathers main competitors The Weather Channel now regularly produces spectacular and pointless graphics to dramatize severe weather and that might break through the ice then we start to run into trouble you need that to support the weight of a man there can be extensive power holy let's all just be thankful that those graphics that advanced were not around during Chernobyl but the companies clearly don't just provide graphics some have their own data collection systems and can use them to augment the weather service data and narrowly tailor forecasts for specific clients for example they could tell a trucking company what Rose will be safest to drive on ahead of winter storms and just listen to Joel Myers founder and CEO of AccuWeather as he provides another particularly vivid example Eddie Vedder was doing a concert in Chicago Live Nation uses our service we gave them a warning he said we just heard from AccuWeather we need to clear the field they did 20 minutes later with everybody out of harm's way a severe lightning storm hit it struck the stage actually right where you have been standing Wow he's claiming a key Weber saved Eddie Vedder's life I guess that's what Eddie was talking about when he famously said and I quote burn out you darling what my voice actually makes a pretty good case therefore the value of private where the company's making sure Eddie better doesn't get struck by lightning is simply not something the National Weather Service has the bandwidth to do so the relationship between the public and the private sector is mutually beneficial in fact sometimes the weather service even buys data from private companies but there can be tensions because the private sector is by its nature inclined to try and grab attention like when AccuWeather rolled out its groundbreaking 45 day forecast despite the fact most experts agree any forecasts beyond seven to ten days is unreliable and one even called it a joke and it gets worse for instance it is the National Weather Service that names tropical storms and they named them to signal that they are important if a storm gets a name like Sandy or Irene then you know you've got to pay attention now they don't name winter storms because winter storms urban flow much more so naming them could inflate their importance or eventually cheapen naming storms altogether which is why it bugged the out of The Weather Service when The Weather Channel suddenly started doing this this season The Weather Channel is naming major winter storms the list includes names like Athena Draco and Magnus and yes look those names rule obviously I'm not disputing that but the point is naming them was a bad idea especially if as they did you call one Janis without say considering what would happen if a forecaster stood in front of one of those letters because you've got a problem on your hands W hey hey honey the news is saying a meanness is getting bigger and is going to be dumping all over us for the next three days but but a bigger source of friction has been the private-sector sense that they might be better off if the National Weather Service did slightly less one notable skirmish came 15 years ago after the National Weather Service made its website more user-friendly and Joel Meyers brother Barry Meyers who was then the company's EVP expressed his serious frustration the National Weather Service recently decided to more aggressively share its data directly with taxpayers but not everyone is in favor of it's more accessible website we work very hard every day competing with other companies and we also have to compete with the government hold on do you though do you have to compete or is the government what makes your industry possible in the first place because without their data every Accuweather Forecast would just be if I know in fact that same year a key weather supported a bill in Congress that could have prevented the Weather Service from doing anything a private company does like providing daily forecasts or putting content on its website now the bill failed which is good because what you do not want is a paywall system of weather we're only paying customers can find out if they're about to drive into a tornado and I'm not even making up that worst case scenario it's basically AccuWeather sales pitch during that same interview where Joel Meyers claimed that he'd saved Eddie Vedder's life he shared an anecdote about a client a railroad company that pays a key whether to give it reports about anything affecting its trains now this is subtle but see if you can pick up on a problem here Union Pacific we told them that a tornado was heading to a spot two trains stopped two miles apart they watched the tornado go between them unfortunately it went into a town that didn't have our servers and a couple dozen people were killed but the railroads did not lose anything the did you just say that is a weird focus on the safety of a railroad over human life that's a man who read Anna Karenina and came away thinking it's a story about a woman who Mowgli inconvenienced a train now now what people did die in that tornado it was actually an example of the warning system working well because while yes AccuWeather did inform their client Union Pacific the National Weather Service also warned the town just a few minutes later giving residents their time to seek shelter but what Myers is doing there is marketing AccuWeather as indispensable for Public Safety which thanks to the current strength of the National Weather Service it isn't freely shared information has tremendous potentially life-saving value although at times his brother Barry has argued otherwise remember how our partners in Europe were able to help us prepare for hurricane sandy just listen to how he described that of special focus during superstorm sandy was the ECMWF so-called European model which did a better job at some points in the storm tract in US models did relying on other countries for better weather models places America in a weak and subservient position weight cooperation makes America weak and subservient that is a viewpoint that would make for a tantalizing bit of a key weather trivia who lost World War 2 Britain for accepting help so it is just crucial that whoever runs the National Weather Service is someone who a sees the obvious benefit of international cooperation and B can stand up to the potential pressures of the private sector and particularly Joel and Barry Myers and at this point you can probably guess what's coming president Trump nominating the AccuWeather CEO he's Barry Meyers and president Trump wants him to be the Undersecretary of the National Weather Service is an interesting nomination yes it is in fact you can even say it's incredibly predictable because everything Trump does is designed to destroy government from the inside the National Weather Service is a terrible government agency to put in the hands of a businessman and while Myers has stepped down from a key where that and divested his stake in the company it is still very much a family business with his son-in-law and wife being employed there in recent years and his two brothers still serving as CEO and co o of the company and yet during his confirmation hearing Mya's insisted that wouldn't be a problem I've made it clear to my brothers in fact jokingly I I explained to them that we may see each other at Thanksgiving dinner and we can talk about football and family things but we cannot talk about Noah really really you won't talk about the thing that could vastly enrich the family business at Thanksgiving or conveniently Thanksgiving is now exactly 45 days away so allow me to make a 45 day forecast aside from the obvious would Barry Meyers want this job if you're thinking well maybe he's just a weather nerd who's always wanted to be at the source of all the information he's not that a few years ago he told the Wall Street Journal I'm not a meteorologist and that as a young man I knew meteorology was not what I wanted to do it's also not like he's hoping to parlay this job into a future lobbying gig on K Street he's a 76 year old multi-millionaire so he has no passion for the subject matter and his family company is as he himself has argued a direct competitor to the agency he's been tapped to run and if that weren't disqualifying enough there is one more concern hanging over his nomination the Labor Department investigation into AccuWeather found multiple sexual harassment claims were ignored by executives it says women who complained feared retaliation right the investigation said the company had a severe and pervasive harassment problem and while the company denies the allegations they also chose not to fight them and the crazy thing here is Mya's has been Trump's nominee for two years now but he hasn't been in the job because the Senate has been sitting on his confirmation trunks already had to resubmit his nomination twice and if Myers isn't confirmed by the end of this year he'll have to do it again which why why not find another guy the fact that for that to happen Trump would have to do stuff know stuff and think workplace harassment is a bad thing and none of us should be holding our breath on that besides it has been easy for Trump to stick by Myers because hardly anyone has been paying attention to this issue which is understandable but we really should be and I'm gonna actually know a way to help here because what better way to illustrate an abstract threat the by learning from the company that since the 80s has perfected turning dry information into state-of-the-art entertainment so please if you will come with me hi there I would like to issue a very important warning for the DC area according to our patented thousand day forecast model superstore Barry is going to cause significant harm to the National Weather Service as you see it originated over here at AccuWeather headquarters and it's been gravitating towards NOAA for nearly two years now if it makes landfall our model suggests there could be significant damage I'm talking mass reindeer suicide sliding Santa off a roof damage that's a lot because we do not want the whole country to be like Eddie Vetter in a position where unless we pay a key whether the next thing you know back weird [Applause] [Music] what I'm saying is super strong berry hitting the National Weather Service could cause a massive data freeze while unfortunately over at AccuWeather there's going to be around a 95% chance of him making it rain [Applause]

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 6,871,923

Rating: 4.9066544 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: qMGn9T37eR8

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/FakeMikeMorgan]

I would wish nothing more then an official NWS app or at least a mobile friendly page.

[u/[deleted]]

NWS now is a good replacement on Android

[u/steakwipe]

this was great, i already had a vague idea that accuweather is bad, but this really drove it home.

also seein Oliver bein like "ok, lets talk about the WEATHER" i knew it was about to get real lol

[u/curious777]

You might want to take a look at the website blog of Cliff Mass, a University of Washington research meteorologist. He and his graduate students spend some time examining the accuracy of various weather sources. I am unable to provide the URL where he posts their results. Great to have objective data rather than just opinion. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com

[u/Estebonrober]

Windy. User funded. No adds. Best sources for information and very customizable. Nice ticks on lightning strikes too.

[u/dicaprihoe]

Is this why Reed announced that he is “excitedly leaving Accuweather”?

[u/SamGewissies]

Read The Fifth Risk. It touches upon this issue as well.

[u/7echArtist]

I was around when Accuweather decided to go after the NWS with that bill. When I found out what Accuweather was trying to do I was furious. I have never recommended them to anyone and have tried to get those that do use them to stop using them. I really hope that company goes out of business. They are no better than any other greedy company out there.

All my weather information I get directly from the NWS’s website and use RadarScope for all my radar needs.

[u/mnpilot]

I use Radarscope and

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Granite+Apps NOAA by GraniteApps

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=joshuatee.wx WX has a ton of pages