ABSTRACT
Today, for many of us, the word ‘meteorology’ conjures up images of the evening news and the weather forecasts offered by television ‘meteorologists’. Given the current debates regarding global warming and climate change, the term ‘meteorology’ points to a science concerned with controversial and difficult-to-prove hypotheses. For many people, meteorology appears to be a speculative subject, in which predictions are very often not borne out. Indeed, current chaos theorists emphasize the difficulty (if not impossibility) of making accurate weather predictions. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of a shared sense of frustration, the weather is always a ‘safe’ subject for conversation, for we assume that everyone is interested in it. Indeed, a certain preoccupation with it is regarded in some regions and occupations as completely normal.
