Rhino power marketing stunt for weather

Meteorologists are a pretty uppity bunch of people. It all started back in the 1970s, when several of them, working in dark rooms and never actually seeing the weather outside, wondered if we might be due for another ice age. This became headline news for a while, and suddenly meteorology was, so to speak, cool. Huge numbers of bad hairstyles and nylon shirts began to appear on TV news programmes.

In the mid-1980s, when it became clear that waiting for an ice age was not going to sustain public attention, they decided that we'd have global warming instead, and that it might be happenning really very soon. Excellent - meteorology gets back onto primetime TV.

Of course, they then realized that it was better to talk about "climate change" than "global warming", because climate change gives you more options - the climate is always changing (a.k.a. weather), and hence they were bound to be right. Climate change has basically funded meteorologists in terms of both money and status for the last few decades - it's win win and, who knows, they may be right. In any event, it'll help to nudge us away from dependence on fossil fuels.

Of late, however, the excitement of climate change has begun to pall slightly. The men in dark rooms have therefore started to try livening up day-to-day weather. The first step has been to give all storms names, presumably to make the weather more personal. I don't know how long this has been going on in the US, but it's a new thing here in the UK. Major storms and, now, lesser storms are named. There are plans afoot to give names to even gentler forms of weather so that, for instance, Breeze Enid might ruffle your hair, or Drizzle Frank might moisten your flowerbeds. Of course, they'll have to start using surnames at some point to avoid confusion; so we'll have "Short Sunny Spell Malcolm Gunderson".

More recently, though, even this has failed to capture the public's attention. Weathermen have therefore had to devise entirely new types of weather. A chilly wind from the north has become a "Polar Vortex", and I have just learned that a particularly strong tornado has been announced as a "Bomb Tornado". (There's one due on the east coast of the USA shortly, as I write this. So if you live on the east coast, eat something heavy now.)

Things are clearly getting out of hand, and what's obviously needed is an entirely new class of weather descriptors. What I propose, following on from [doc]'s excellent lead, is that weather be quantified in rhinos, based on the number of actual rhinos that it would take to do similar damage in, say, a back yard.

Thus, a gale becomes a "rhino event". A hurricane might be a "two rhino" or even "five rhino" event. A gentle breeze might be only a few millirhinos, and a heavy downpour might be a few centirhinos. This will open up new televisual opportunities for the weathermen and weatherwomen, including appearances in crossover weather-wildlife documentaries.