If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is people who find it within themselves to challenge or even ridicule those who are better qualified than them in their chosen profession.

My job is easy, but I guess it feels that way because I have been doing it twenty years, so it is a bit like riding a bike. However, there are still times when people seem to think they can run it better than me, despite having no experience. Business banking managers are a personal favourite, coming up with maverick solutions to cash-flow like; “How about asking your clients for the money up front?”

I have heard similar tales from friends of mine who are web designers, electricians, plumbers or decorators. They get questioned whether they are using the right domain names, paint, cable, or pipework, by people who are not in the slightest bit qualified.

If this is annoying to my peers and I, imagine what it must be like when your educated opinion that has come from years of professional training and experience, gets ignored by the general public who decide instead to spread and share false news and gossip through social media that has has emanated from the mouths or pens of unqualified idiots?

I raise this point because earlier this week I read a really interesting article on the Met Office website that explained the process of ‘sudden stratospheric warming.‘ This is a complex situation where the Jet Stream that drives our weather is blocked, culminating in cold air plunging across Britain, thus allowing wintry conditions to prevail rather than mild Atlantic westerlies. This, the article explains, is likely to blight our 2016 journey into spring.

The thing is, I first read about this in November last year on a blog written on the Met Office website. The article was suggesting that we were in for a very wet and extremely mild winter, followed by a cold snap as we we enter into Spring. This, detailed research had told them, was the most likely effect of strong El Nino in the South Pacific and it has to be said they were just about bang on with their research.

This was public information from the most recognised and respected meteorological organisation in the world, yet social media was jammed with headlines from most notably, The Daily Express, but also the The Mail and the Mirror Group (Daily Mirror, The Independent), claiming we were in for ‘Weather Bombs’,  ‘A Deadly Ice Age’ or a ‘Polar Plunge’.

It would appear that the masses would prefer to believe Nathan Rao, a tuppence bit journalist with a paper owned by a pornography magnate, rather than highly qualified meteorologists. How insulting must that feel…how did we get to a point where the unqualified are heard and the qualified are treated with such contempt?

It would seem that we have reached a point in the human cycle where nothing is allowed to be ordinary any more, meaning that someone like a qualified weather forecaster, a doctor, or a pro-Europe politician even, who offers a judgement that is sound but undramatic, will not be heard or worse still, ridiculed.

If you go to the cinema or to a concert, it either has to be “ABSOLUTELY AWESOME” or “ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL”, because if you say “yeah it was pretty good actually”  or “well it was okay, but not the best” you will soon be talking to yourself, just like someone from the Met Office who refuses to predict SNOWMAGEDDON!!

People really need to start getting a grip and reading information based on facts and research, rather than sensationalist nonsense and deluded nostalgia, otherwise we will end up in desperate straights where we will have lunatics running the asylum and unqualified idiots forecasting the economy as well as the weather.

“And now a recap on today’s headlines with me Katie Hopkins…as construction of the Kent barrier continues, Iain Duncan-Smith has announced a multi-million pound investment for contractors Smith Duncan Iain, to build Victorian torture chambers for the poor…Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has hilariously fallen of his bike again and Michael Gove has survived another day without getting his face punched in.

“Now over to Nathan Rao with the weather….I hear a ‘Nuclear Blizzard’ is on the way Nathan?”