The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) yesterday told a college student to remove an amateur weather forecast from a social networking Web site or face the risk of court action and a heavy fine. The bureau issued the threat after Tseng Yu-lin posted his prediction and analysis on his Facebook page about Typhoon Ma-on, which recently formed in the Pacific and might affect Taiwan.
Tseng’s action could violate the Meteorological Act (氣象法), bureau officials said.
According to the act, individuals and organizations can be fined between NT$200,000 (US$7,000) and NT$1 million for issuing weather forecasts or warnings of hazardous meteorological or seismic phenomena without the bureau’s permission.
Tseng’s blog has drawn hundreds of viewers per day since he started the thread. He has since acceded to the CWB demand and removed the material in question.
Adding further controversy to Tseng’s posts is the fact that he asked CWB Forecast Center Director Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典), who also maintains a personal blog about the weather to comment on the differences between their blogs.
Cheng’s blog, a mixture of scientific knowledge and personal opinions, has caused several media storms because some of the information he has posted has contradicted his own bureau’s forecasts.
For instance, when tropical storms Namtheun and Lionrock formed off Taiwan in September last year, Cheng predicted on Facebook that the two storms would merge. The CWB, however, released no information to that effect, and Cheng’s prediction later proved entirely false.
“We encourage discussions and thoughts about weather, but we don’t want the public, including weather officials, to make personal forecasts,” CWB Director-General Shin Tzay-chyn (辛在勤) said.
There have been other similar cases in the past in which amateurs have used personal blogs to disseminate their predictions, most notably the self-styled “Teacher Wang,” who managed to convince a group of his followers that a magnitude 14 super-earthquake would “rip Taiwan in half” on May 11, which stirred up considerable panic in some quarters.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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