Column

With the recent deep freeze you may find yourself asking, how much longer will we have to put up with this?

Well, the good news is, if you take weather predictions from a rodent, the answer is for six more weeks.

The word came down at 7:25 a.m. Eastern Time, when Punxsutawney Phil, the great, furry prognosticator of weather, was ceremoniously lifted to the sky today and saw his shadow, signaling six more weeks of this!

Of course, while Feb. 2 is nationally recognized as Groundhog Day, Phil, the pampered meteorologist, has a track record that makes the Magic-8 Ball look good.

It would seem that Phil is wrong over 70% of the time. In fact, since 1887, the year someone thought it would be fun to hold a ceremony and base the coming of the spring on whether it was sunny or overcast and throw in a large rodent for good measure, Phil has predicted six more weeks of winter 108 times and called for an early spring 20 times. Ten years of his predictions weren’t recorded at all, which I assume means even the scribes gave up trying to make sense of the whole thing.

That’s an accuracy rate of about 35%. Not great. If your mechanic was only successful fixing your car about 35% of the time, you’d go elsewhere. And yet every year, Phil keeps his following.

Meanwhile, the Farmer’s Almanac, which the University of Illinois found to be accurate about half the time, gathers dust on a shelf while a groundhog gets a ceremony.

Of course, here in Illinois, what a groundhog has to say hardly matters. Our weather will do what our weather usually does and that’s change so rapidly that you could be wearing a parka in the morning and sporting shorts and sandals by dinner. We’ll probably have weeks of that because there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to Illinois weather.

So how does Phil get it so wrong, so consistently, and still get a special day named after him?

Simple. He’s adorable, he’s harmless and he’s the only forecaster in America who never has to apologize. Not once has he issued a statement saying, “My bad, folks, I really thought spring was coming this time.”

Maybe that’s the charm. Maybe we like the idea that once a year the jet streams play no role in our weather. Maybe we enjoy the spectacle of grown adults in formalwear consulting a rodent like he’s the Oracle of Delphi.

Or maybe, and this feels most true, Groundhog Day isn’t really about the forecast at all, although some do find comfort if Phil thinks spring can’t be far away, but maybe it’s more about embracing the fact that the weather, like life, is unpredictable.

And there is a silver lining in all of this of course. If Phil is wrong over 70% of the time, maybe spring is just around the corner! I like our odds.