LONDON — The dominant local primate's principal weather-information service, the British Broadcasting Corporation, has published the following headline: "Could El Niño mean there are no Atlantic hurricanes this year?" The question mark sits above a measurement that is already complete. For the first time in three decades, not a single Atlantic hurricane formed in September, normally the most active month of the basin's storm calendar. The service has taken a closed September and refiled it as a possibility.
El Niño, for readers unfamiliar with this planet's atmosphere, is a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that rearranges weather patterns worldwide. Forecasters consulted by the service report that it tends to strengthen winds above the Atlantic, which pull young storms apart before they can organize. That is the mechanism. The headline is not about the mechanism. The headline is about the mood of one verb.
The staff who measured the event used the indicative mood. "We counted the storms and the count was zero," said Dr. Priya Raghavan, a duty forecaster at a coastal storm-monitoring centre. "September is the month the Atlantic normally fills. This September did not fill. There is nothing conditional in the data."
The conversion occurs further up the desk. "A headline that says 'is' can be contradicted by Tuesday," explained Gerald Osei, Chief Sub-Editor, Weather. "'Could' cannot be wrong. It can only be early." Asked when a possibility stops being early and starts being late, Osei said the desk preferred to let readers arrive before the fact did.
The distance between briefing and event is measurable here, as it usually is. The event spans thirty years of observation and ends in a zero. The coverage spans one verb, deployed in the conditional. The species retires perfectly wearable clothing on a schedule and calls the practice fashion. The headline suggests a parallel schedule for facts, which are moved from the indicative to the conditional while still serviceable.
Intercept filed as follows: Atlantic basin, September. Hurricanes observed: zero. Previous zero: thirty years prior. Verbs deployed in coverage: one. Mood of verb: conditional. Distance between briefing and event: one word.
