KNOX — Failed ‘Storm of the Century’ is bad news for some

Jack Knox was born in snowy Kamloops but now writes for the Times-Colonist in Victoria and has forgotten what snow looks like.

COLUMN — Saw an NBC reporter refer to New York City snow accumulations as “disappointing” on Tuesday.

By “disappointing” he meant the Storm of the Century the networks had feared/hoped for had failed to dump enough snow to cripple the Big Apple, ending any threat/dream of the city descending into a frozen Dennis Quaid disaster-movie dystopia.

We in the news media have been accused of treating natural disasters with a certain eager anticipation, which is hard to deny in light of all the thinly veiled moping by those who were promised Mother Nature would deliver a Jerry Springer slap-fight but got a Dr. Phil group hug instead Tuesday.

It’s called storm porn. Unless pretty little Brandi from Eyewitness Weather is getting Fear Factored on camera — drenched by crashing waves, buried by a passing snowplow, knocked senseless by a flying beer can in Hurricane Alley, or choking on volcano ash like a cat horking up a hairball — the viewers aren’t happy. Unless Ian Handsomemanthing is desperately clinging perpendicular to a stop sign, snapping in the wind like a flag from a flagpole, the ratings ain’t there.

It’s not just a television thing. Last week, more than one Canadian newspaper repeated a headline declaring Vancouver Island will “rip open like a zipper” when a megathrust earthquake hits. Deliciously graphic, except nowhere in the Canadian Press story was an expert actually quoted as saying that, leading to suspicions that the headline writer A) learned how to use “quotation marks” from Joey on Friends, or B) was channelling a certain wishful thinking.

The latter sentiment would be in keeping with the way many of those in the more frostbitten bits of the Great White North feel about the West Coast. A certain envy/resentment has some silently hoping the Almighty will give Victoria and Vancouver the ol’ Sodom-and-Gomorrah treatment, if not ripping open our zipper, then at least unleashing a little fire and brimstone.

This attitude is more prevalent than one would hope. Last weekend, when the temperature in Victoria nudged 15 C, your relatives in -24 Ottawa weren’t as sympathetic as you thought when you called to complain about it being so warm that you had to peel down to your Lulus to work in the garden.

Remember that during the legendary Blizzard of ’96, the most significant injuries were to residents of Violated Livestock, Sask., who broke their wrists high-fiving each other while watching footage of Victorians attempting to shovel their driveways with boogie boards.

When the City of Gardens does get hit by a storm — buried by snow (OK, ankle deep) or slammed by a howling sou’easter that sends peacocks tumbleweeding across Beacon Hill Park — we always ask: “Is this a sign of global warming?”

Then climatologist Andrew Weaver is trotted out to explain that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change, but climate change does cause extreme weather to occur more frequently.

Except now that Weaver is a Green MLA and preoccupied with weightier matters like fending off Twitter attacks from the NDP’s Doug Routley, he gets trotted out far less often; little did the global-warming deniers know that all they needed to do to muzzle Weaver was to thrust him into public life.

This does not mean the climate-change crisis has gone away, or that we don’t need to deal with it.

It doesn’t fit well into the news cycle, though. We’re not good with slow-speed disasters, or story lines that never change. (Day One headline: Climate Change Threatens Earth. Day Two headline: Climate Change Still Threatens Earth. Day Three headline: Climate Change: No Change to Earth Threat. Day Four headline: Kim Kardashian Parodies Self in T-Mobile Super Bowl Commercial.)

The same can be said of The Big One. (Day One headline: Earthquake Threatens Vancouver Island. Day Two headline: Earthquake Still Threatens Vancouver Island. Day Three headline: “Earthquake: No Change to Vancouver Island Threat. Fourth day headline: Vic West Boy Wins Trip to Esquimalt.)

Let’s pray for continued disappointment.

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