Good post by RP Jr here. James "on holiday" Annan should take note :-).
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« Best disturbing songs | Main | No excuse for inaction when times get tough »
Too many met folk?
Category: climate people
Posted on: July 17, 2008 5:36 PM, by William M. Connolley
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Environment
Comments
Define met folk, does this include talking heads on TV? Science policy students?
[I decline to define. There were some comments on RPs blog on this; for me, it was just the general idea -W]
Posted by: Eli Rabett | July 17, 2008 9:24 PM
I blame Discovery & The Weather Channel. They are almost permanently showing tornado & hurricane chasers, and "Storm Stories". There's probably a lot of people who thing that you can go our and get a Met degree and turn into a storm chaser. Actually, you can but probably not a professional one.
This can be seen in the UK, see UKww, where there are a number of professional meteorologists and a larger number of amateurs who do storm chase, and use met. knowledge to do that. There are semi-regular posts from people wanting to become meteorologists on that, and many other forums, and I bet (for many of them) that it's not because they quite like the idea of producing road forecasts for local authorities (as interesting an exercise as that is).
Either that or they want to make a name for themselves by disproving AGW. ;)
Anyway, it's not really a problem as they can get jobs doing other things and use the met. knowledge for personal use. Of all the physicists I knew at university (between five and ten) not one of them got a graduate job using physics. Most became IT people, and two got jobs in the city doing some job or other that justifies its existence by existing, and earn a lot of money doing it.
Posted by: Adam | July 18, 2008 4:32 AM
It really does make a difference. There is, as you well know, an oversupply of people who get a doctorate in climate studies which sometimes is in meteorology, sometimes in atmospheric sciences or in earth sciences. OTOH there are a lot more who, as Adam points out, want to work with the Weather Channel.
So by mushing these two threads together you get typical RP Jr. misdirection which tells you "huge problem" and points you in the wrong direction for solving it and I am not, as JF would say, doing my thing here.
Think astronomy. A whole lot more people study astronomy then can be professional astronomers, but the amateur astronomy community is a huge strength.
Posted by: Eli Rabett | July 18, 2008 11:01 AM