Politicians, press overly vindictive to forecasters

His boss is doing what he can to keep the most capable weatherman Taiwan has ever had. But Wu insists that he retire ahead of schedule. He is 56 now and has at least nine more years before reaching retirement age.

The reason why he has decided to quit is: Our people, particularly politicians and biased press commentators, are overly vindictive.

The ace weatherman has long wanted to retire from the job he loves. He has been criticized for “wrong” predictions on how typhoons behave. Government leaders from President Ma Ying-jeou on down panned him for failure to correctly predict how Typhoon Morakot would hit Taiwan. Commentators wanted his head. All for the wrong reason.

For one thing, no one can give a fool-proof forecast of a tropical cyclone. There simply are too many variables to make such a prediction in the first place. And to err is human, just as Alexander Pope said. But our people probably do not know what Pope pointed out immediately after the first part of his poetic dictum. “To forgive divine,” he intoned.

There is little doubt that none of our politicians and commentators are very forgiving persons. They needed a scapegoat for the disaster Morakot brought Taiwan on August 8-9, where more than 700 people were killed and a third of Taiwan was under flood waters and mudslides. And they found one in the person of Wu the weatherman.

That's why Wu made up his mind to quit after he was taken to task when Typhoon Parma didn't hit Taiwan after it had threatened to include the island on its onslaught for a couple of days over the past weekend. It was the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Is it too much to ask our politicians to be a little more lenient? They err much more often than Wu the weather forecaster, yet they still want the “to forgive is divine” part of Pope's admonition from the public. Look at former President Chen Shui-bian. He is standing trial for raking in billions of dollars in bribes. He hopes Uncle Sam can bail him out by claiming he was “an agent of the U.S. military government” ruling Taiwan for eight years on its behalf.

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