2013-12-12 – It was minus19 degrees this morning. Doesn’t that seem frigid?

What I didn’t tell you is that I gave you the temperature in Celsius. Farenheit was minus three. Much better, right? I hate to tell you what the wind chill was. It was 244 degrees. Warm and toasty, right?

That last one was in degrees Kelvin, a scientific scale that zeros out at absolute zero—as cold as it can get. 244 degrees Kelvin is much toastier than absolute zero, but it’s still cold. All these temperatures are the same.

When you go outside, the weather is what it is. On a morning like today, you better be bundled up. Minus three is bad enough. Why do they need to tell us the wind chill? If you think about it for a moment, you have to come to the conclusion that they want to make us feel miserable. It’s sensational. All the weather folks can feel like they are narrating some sort of disaster when all it is is routine winter weather.