Your tax dollars at work.
For the record, NOAA found that Punxsutawney Phil ranked a poor 17th among weather-forecasting groundhogs. Here are the leaders. The most accurate weather predictor of the bunch was Staten Island Chuck, who accurately predicted the arrival of spring 85% of the time.
THIS YEAR’S PREDICTIONS: Phil and Chuck disagreed, like tiny, burrowing versions of Mad Dog Russo and Stephen A. Smith. Phil predicted six more weeks of winter this year, while Chuck predicted an early spring.
Given the lack of reliability in these predictions, it seems to me that the NOAA needs to spend more of my taxes to determine whether other burrowing animals are more accurate than ground hogs, and whether above-ground hibernating animals could be more effective.
I would not want to be the meteorologist who has to get a hibernating grizzly into the sunlight.
Now if I wanted to account for climate change, I would use a blind ground hog. He would therefore never see his shadow, and therefore would always predict an early spring. He might not always be right, but he’d always be a crowd-pleaser on Feb 2.