Predictions are just bets in a tuxedo

A winter weather advisory at Lake Tahoe didn’t survive the first day last weekend, having been canceled before lunchtime.

With temperatures hitting nearly 50 degrees, people could be forgiven for wondering when winter is actually going to turn up.

There’s a lot of technology that goes into predicting what the weather is going to do in Western Nevada, but all the artificial intelligence and computing power on Earth is no match for Mother Nature when it comes to forecasting a Sierra winter storm.

With the arrival of the new year, we’re going to be bombarded with predictions about 2024. Because no one clicks on something that says everything’s going to be fine, those predictions will trend toward the most disturbing possible.

The spectral fingers of war, famine, conquest and death beckon from across the globe. Contagion should be a fifth horseman, but folks didn’t know how diseases worked when they cooked up the concept.

There’s plenty going on in this world of ours to worry about right now without adding potential future calamities to the mix.

How do we cope? How do we deal with the constant influx of increasingly terrifying assertions when we carry the means to consume them in our pockets?

It’s easy to look at predictions as fact, but keep in mind that they are at best wagers processed through the prognosticator’s point of view. If every bet was a winner, Nevada’s casinos would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

There are an estimated 8 billion people on this planet, most of whom will go through their daily lives over the coming year without being swept into the maws of disaster.

Bad things will happen to some people as they go about their business, but good things will happen, too, most of which will go unoticed.

We just don’t know what the future actually holds.

Paraphrasing Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps we should accept there are things we cannot change, have the courage to change things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Happy New Year.