There is a point of view, much vaunted on the Letters page of late, that in meteorology, as in other walks of life, it is desirable to leave it to the experts. History is rich in examples of what can happen if you don't.
Take Ancient Greece, for instance. Aristotle, as we know, was one of the founding fathers of our science, and even coined the word for meteorology. Although, like practitioners today, he was not always right, at least his expressed opinions were based on the best available knowledge of his time.
Some of his theories are respected still.
When Aristotle passed away in 322 BC, he was succeeded as head of the famous peripatetic school of philosophy in Athens by one Tyrantus, better known by his nom de plume of Theophrastus. The latter was, by all accounts, a very pleasing speaker; indeed his nickname means "divinely eloquent".
Although a botanist by profession, his most influential work, called Characters, was a study in psychology, and to round off his many talents he decided to try his hand at meteorology.
But his weather muse never seemed quite to arrive. He produced two major works on the subject, De Ventis, or "Concerning the Winds", and De Signis Aquarum et Ventorum, translated as "The Book of Signs". It is on the latter work, where he responded to demands for a set of rules for forecasting the weather, that his reputation as a meteorologist chiefly rests.
Theophrastus's ideas might have been all right in moderation, but he overdid it: he came up with no fewer than 80 signs of rain, 45 indications of the future wind, 50 signs of storms, 24 indications of fair weather, and seven ways in which to tell the weather for a year ahead.
In all, there were more than 200 weather maxims, some of them duplicated and many contradictory. The lengthy lists included nearly all the well-known weather lore familiar to us now, and many notions of his own as well.
His signs of rain, for example, included shooting stars, black spots on the sun or moon and "many bubbles on the surface of a river". If a storm was due, said Theophrastus, look out for "asses shaking their ears", "sheep and cattle fighting for their food" and "a crow cawing twice and then a third time".
Thus is Theophrastus remembered after all these years - not for his eponymous "divine eloquence", but for the awful nonsense that he wrote about the weather.
If there be a moral, or maybe even two, to such a fable, I feel sure that you will have no trouble finding them.