Blame It on the Weather

W.J.C. Cherwinski is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the co-author of Lectures in Canadian Labour and
Working-Class History.

It took Ice Storm ’98 for urban dwellers to realize that rural people
aren’t the only ones affected by bad weather. The result has been a
spate of publications dealing with climatic extremes; Blame It on the
Weather is one of the better ones. Its author, a senior climatologist
with Environment Canada’s Atmospheric Environment Service, has been
affiliated with The Weather Network and Canadian Geographic.

His book provides ample ammunition for conversation on a subject very
close to those Canadians who do not lead hermetically sealed lives. But
Blame It on the Weather is more than a compendium of entertaining
trivia. It introduces readers to a wide variety of weather phenomena and
shows how their appearance can be anticipated according to certain
predictable conditions. It also tries to help readers better understand
and interpret routine weather information presented by the media,
including the percentages associated with the probability of
precipitation.