First: I hate winter. The older I get, the more I hate winter. To be honest about it, I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can like winter. Working in journalism, I own no winter toys and never will. Bad winters are expensive. if you have school-age children, bad winters are disruptive when school and athletic events are canceled due to the weather. If climate change is causing milder winters where I live, I am all for it. The only good thing about winter is my ability to broadcast basketball, which has nothing to do with winter weather. (See the previous comment about “disruptive.”)

The contrasting point is that the Farmers’ Almanac release sounds a lot to me like weather porn — essentially exaggerating their winter forecast for the purpose of pumping up sales. If anything, the weather forecasting profession, such as it is, seems to be doing that more and more on the reasoning that if they say, for instance, that if they forecast Stormageddon or Snowpocalypse and that doesn’t happen, the only damage is to their credibility, which isn’t great anyway due to this area’s very variable weather. (The heavy rain and floods of the past couple of weeks were on no one’s radar screen, so to speak, earlier this summer.)

For what it’s worth, the Old Farmer’s Almanac (note the singular) forecast seems more logical than the Farmers’ Almanac (note the plural) forecast if an El Niño is going to take place this winter. El Niños (or should that be Los Niños?) produce warmer Midwest winters, as opposed to La Niñas (or should that be Las Niñas?). It’s unclear whether the Farmers’ forecast is based on a prediction of a snowy October in Siberia, which was the alleged cause of the polar vortex that besieged the Midwest in the damnable winter fo 2013–14. (Which was followed by the first two tornadoes to hit the city of the Presteblog World Headquarters in 44 years, but we’ll deal with that later if we have to.)

Country Living adds a caveat:

It’s worth noting that the National Weather Service‘s predictions were similar to the OFA’s: above-normal temps for most of the country, particularly the Southwest, Northeast, and Northwestern Alaska.

Of course, as The Washington Post notes, you should take all this with a grain of salt, as weather forecasting is simply not yet advanced enough to ensure accurate predictions this far out. Still, it never hurts to be prepared for any kind of weather. Time to shop for snow boots—or better yet, boots that double as rain and snow boots!