The Tarnished Frame
Last week Tom Playfair from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) at Observatory Hill returned my call, and we began to flesh out a possible scientific explanation for a rather odd-shaped weather system I’d observed forming over Sydney. As a digital storm chaser, I explained, I’d been purloining evocatively-marbled screen grabs from the regularly-sequencing frames of BOM’s rain radar on my home computer for several months, but the allegorical clarity of one particular frame had rattled me. For what had begun as a free-wheeling and largely-whimsical aesthetic enquiry, had, I felt, suddenly delivered an alarming and portentous mosaic … redolent surely of the profile of a young woman? I asked Tom whether, during all his years at the Bureau, he had ever seen a ‘weather silhouette’. The phenomenon, he divulged sotto voce, had only recently been recorded. Better data (unlikely, due to deep federal cuts to climate-science-funding) was urgently required. A call to the folks @ Market Forces, a publicly-funded vigilante group busy exposing wilful ignorance, obfuscation and inaction across Australia’s fossil-fuelled banking and superannuation sectors, subsequently confirmed that I was not alone in my experience.