Storm in a teacup

It's winter, so it's windy, wet and cold. But do we really need all this Sturm und Drang from the weather forecasters?

No one can argue with the fact that it has been a stormy end to the week, with roaring gales in the west and snow falling on the hills in the north. But, excuse me, why all the melodrama? We all live in northern Europe. It is February, after all. And last time I checked, that means it's winter.

I really don't want to sound like a Telegraph leader-writer, but if there is one thing that beautifully illustrates the spread of the risk-averse culture into every media life in this country it is surely the weather forecast. For the last week, the forecasters have been a state of barely suppressed hysteria about the onslaught that was due to be unleashed on Britain last night and today - before disappearing almost as soon as it arrives.

And all over what exactly? Strong winds off the Atlantic in late January. Snowfalls in the north at the start of February? Nasty weather, sure. But the forecasters should calm down. These things are not new, not strange, not unexpected and not unsurvivable. We can cope. We know what to do. We don't need telling that if the temperature drops below freezing, it might get icy on the pavement or the car window may need scraping in the morning. We don't need all the melodrama and the hyperbole that now routinely prefaces and accompanies a bit of bad weather.

Why is the weather forecast so over-the-top nowadays, compared with the time when winters, as my mother-in-law never tires of saying, really were winters? It's partly, of course, because of the 1987 hurricane and Michael Fish's famous insouciance about the impending storm. But this isn't a sufficient explanation. They haven't been overcompensating for 21 years just because of one missed hurricane.

It's partly also - Telegraph leader time again, but it's true nonetheless - because of risk aversion, insurance fears, the compensation culture, the nanny state and all that stuff. Even so, I suspect this is more of a process of cultural osmosis affecting the weather forecast rather than some more specific change. Maybe someone knows different - in which case I would be interested to know quite how it works - but I don't think the proliferation of the "severe weather warning" culture is primarily about the fear that the Met Office would actually be liable for damages claims if it failed to alert people that the pavement might be a bit slippery. I think it's that they can't stop themselves telling us what's good for us.

But there's also at least one media dimension to it as well. Overall, the warnings have got more severe and the language more hysterical at the same time as the weather itself has actually become more placid. We have milder winters not wilder ones, as a rule. But the weather forecast is competing for media space with other forms of entertainment, and so, perhaps, the forecasters are under market pressure to come up with more dramatic weather stories than the facts actually justify.

There's a not so subtle car culture tyranny wrapped up in this, too. Have you ever noticed how often the weather forecast is expressed not in terms of what the weather will be, but in terms of how it will affect the car driver. Rain, wind, snow or fog - you won't hear much about any of them on the forecast without hearing how it will affect the motorist. It's never the non-motorist, the postman, the rough-sleeper or the mere pedestrian. Always the motorist alone. Heavy rain invariably means "atrocious driving conditions" in forecastspeak. Why atrocious rather than tricky, by the way? All part of the over-inflated language problem, I suppose.

Twenty-four hour cable news channels also play a role. When they deploy a reporter to stand by the M6 in the Lake District all day with updates on the expected tempests - yet with not a flake of snow in sight - the broadcasters more or less challenge the local authorities and the transport agencies to put their emergency systems into action too. This happens a lot in America, where the broadcasters sometimes start demanding action from mayors and emergency services before the conditions actually justify it.

Sometimes, of course, the conditions do justify it. The 1987 English hurricane casts a shadow over the hyper-forecast culture, but so too does the shadow of Hurricane Katrina. What if this winter storm turned into our Katrina? Can we afford to take the chance that we might miss the story? The Gulf of Mexico may be 4,000 miles away from the Lake District, and the weather systems may have almost nothing to do with one another, but we in the media can dream - and our dream sometimes becomes the country's reality, whether or not the weather justifies it.

The weather forecast was one of the last bits of public service broadcasting not to be contaminated by the ratings war. All that's changed now. The weather may not be any worse than it used to be. I wish I could say the same about the forecast.