9/22/2023 0 Comments One minute timersOn social media there is almost as much chat about weather apps as there is about the weather: much of it is ire about inaccurate forecasts some of it is from users who admit checking weather apps more than seems logical. Preoccupation with weather apps is commonplace in our current unsettled atmosphere. It’s unprecedented, so it’s hard to tell if your anxiety is proportional to the threat you’re feeling.”įifty per cent of US smartphone users regularly use weather apps. In many ways, she points out, it would be odd not to feel anxious, given the climate emergency. “That has made my obsession quite a lot worse,” she says. “It asks: ‘do you want to know about record temperatures today?’” Then a quiz appears, asking whether the day’s temperature is above or below average, historically. She has three weather apps on her smartphone, but recently a widget has started popping up, unbidden, on Microsoft Edge on her computer. “I would think: so it’s not a record temperature in Liverpool today. During last summer’s unprecedented heatwave in the UK, she says, “there was a lot of talk of: ‘will we make it to 40C?’ I kept checking in the hope that we wouldn’t.” She would watch the numbers rise on her app, with trepidation, and would then feel relieved to see them peak, thinking: “We’re on our way down and things haven’t burst into flames.” She would check different locations. It’s behavior that Jess Green, who lives in Liverpool, England, might relate to. Or else he looks at the weather in other places, where it is less hot, and he has family, and will think: “Oh, maybe I can just go there for a little bit.” The temperature in Austin has been in the 110s Fahrenheit (40s Celsius) for weeks he’ll keep checking the apps, even when he knows no change is likely.
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