Weather and Politics

I noticed a curious thing this morning while watching the BBCs news. See the map above. Notice the distribution of cities among England, Scotland and northern Ireland. Notice the absence of any cities in the Republic of Ireland—places like Dublin or Shannon or Galway, which are certainly in the path of the same weather fronts as London, Cardiff, Belfast, Newcastle or Leeds. The exclusion has to do with the still uneasy relationship between the United Kingdom and the Irish. Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. The southern Republic of Ireland is not. The differentiation based on political lines a map seems comically arbitrary. I doubt the clouds and sunshine pay much attention as they pass from one jurisdiction to another. To double check myself, I checked the weather maps for several major border cities in the United States. More than in the U.K, American maps do tend to spill over to Canadian and Mexican cities within range of local broadcast signals, but they too were surprisingly "political" in their exclusions of large swaths of foreign territories. In future, as the world becomes a more global society, not bound by arbitrary political borders, we may have start with a re-examination of something as fundamental as the weather map.