The cabañuelas and the hoax of a new Filomena on January 24

Is it true that there will be another Filomena in January? This is the million dollar question in all conversations since a few months ago the cabañuelas phenomenon was reborn, a method used by shepherds and peasants from Spain and Latin America to predict the weather when there was no meteorology. "In the eighties there was still talk of this, but I thought that it was out of date and that nowadays no one would believe in such a thing, it is unheard of", reflects with infinite laziness Ángel Rivera, former spokesman for the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet ). The fault lies with the unscrupulousness of many media, blinded by

, the loss of

, the denials and Jorge Rey, a 15-year-old boy from the Monastery of Rodilla (Burgos) who learned it from a pastor and whom some describe as a meteorologist and interview as if he were one.

The adolescent's

, who defines himself as a “naturalist and weatherman”, speaks of heavy snowfall in his community.

Although the cabañuelas are very abstract and local, he assures that there will be another Filomena on January 24.

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The seasonal forecast of the AEMET

Video: AEMT

Until now, it was still a picturesque note and many meteorologists did not want to comment on it so as not to give it fuel. Without citing the cabañuelas, Aemet published a video in November insisting that the probability of this snowfall repeating is barely 1%. But on Sunday, the hoax turned dark brown when on the 1 am newscast, a journalist slipped that the Madrid City Council has reinforced 35% of the troops to face the Filomena predicted by the cabañuelas. The City Council, which uses "of course" the parts of Aemet, "has nothing to say" and refers to a press release on Friday, in which neither cabañuelas nor Filomena 2 appear. The increase in media is real, but the cause is not: it is due to the new specifications of the cleaning contract,made according to the needs of the city and not in anticipation of another eventual historical snowfall. The journalist apologized for her "mistake" on Twitter, which she attributed to a "poor composition of the sentence", but its severity worried meteorologists.

Given the criticism received for how I ended up this live talking about Las Cabañuelas.

My respect always to science and to my colleagues at @ElTiempo_tve.

And my sincere apologies if you were bothered by my talking about it.

To them and to those who are dedicated to meteorology.

- Rosa Correa (@rosacorrea_tv) January 9, 2022

"It is a non-scientific method of pseudo-prediction, the horoscope of meteorology," says Beatriz Hervella, spokesperson for Aemet. It consists of observing weather parameters - such as temperature, cloud shape or wind direction - and animal behaviors - such as the flight of birds, the presence of winged ants or the ear of mules - during the first 12 days August ―January in Latin America―, which are considered one way, and the following 12, back. Its results are projected at 12 months of the year. The origin of the term is in the Jewish festival of Tabernacles, mentioned in documents of the eleventh century. “It is a folkloric tradition that has neither rigor nor validity”, Hervella explains, since the scientific method is not followed, nor is it subjected to validation or evaluation. Aemet has, for example,a degree of accuracy to a day view of 84.3% in the maximum temperatures, with an error of less than two degrees.

“It makes no sense to infer that because in August the atmosphere behaved in such a way, in January it will snow, because it has no memory.

Its own chaotic and complex nature, which we analyze with non-linear equations, theoretical models, a large amount of data and supercomputers, prevents offering a reliable prediction with high probabilities of a specific event such as a snowfall beyond seven or ten days ”, argues.

Thus, forecasting a Filomena for a specific day weeks or months in advance is, "quite simply, impossible."

"And whoever says it is lying," adds Francisco Martín, coordinator of the magazine

and retired from the State Meteorological Corps, who does not understand how there are "means that lend themselves to this circus and to sell donkeys."

Daniel Santos Muñoz, expert in supercomputing applied to meteorology and systems project manager in the European meteorological consortia Accord and Hirlam, recalls the brutal advance of this science in the last 30 years, but warns that "when the scope is greater, the lower the reliability ”. "We have improved a lot in the short term, we advance one day per decade and today we have the same probability of success for the fifth day from today as for the second 20 years ago", he explains, to highlight "the null likelihood" of these popular beliefs, which he compares with the groundhog Phil of Pennsylvania, the octopus Paul of the Eurocup, homeopathy or the tarot. To make it better understood, Santos makes a simile: “A doctor makes an X-ray of you, listens to you, applies his knowledge and gives you a diagnosis and a pill.Well, this is like going to the healer, who looks at your left toenail and tells you that you have gastroenteritis ".

Juan Jesús González Alemán, researcher in atmospheric dynamics, does not get out of his stupor when he sees how "a curiosity that is taken for granted that does not work" has grown until it explodes "because it has not stopped its feet". González, for whom cabañuelas "are to meteorology what astrology is to astrophysics", regrets what is happening, since it devalues ​​the media and his own profession. In his opinion, it is "a symptom of the lack of meteorological and scientific culture." Martín, who recalls that in the United States and in Great Britain a training certificate is required for communicators of the time, compares the hoax of the cabañuelas with that of the great world blackout and thinks that it is “a sign of these times in which use fear to make a society irrational ”. For Martín, if the producers of

are looking for a country for a sequel, "Spain would be perfect, it has the basic ingredients" for a dystopia of stupidity.

The predicament of the cabañuelas worries the professionals, who alert the public that they should not trust them or similar methods such as the Zaragoza calendar or the temporas, whose predictions "are neither fulfilled nor sustained," Rivera notes. "This chufla is being normalized in the media," complains Hervella, who recalls that meteorology is a specialty of physics and that 1,100 experts follow the evolution of the weather in Aemet. Rivera, who calls for responsibility and rigor, stresses that Filomena was predicted with total precision four or five days before, which 10 years ago would have been unthinkable, and adds an ingredient of complexity, climate change: “A Castilian cabañuelista admitted me, when It was just beginning to talk about the warm-up, that he could no longer tell the time because things had changed a lot.Sayings are no longer useful ”. At the moment, for science there is no Filomena 2. "There is a very robust anticyclone," Hervella explains, which prevents the passage of storms. If the cabañuelas were correct, it would be "luck and chance".