The Summer Solstice: Astronomy Is Not Meteorology

It boggles the mind that the same meteorologists who know that June, July, and August days are counted when calculations are made on the average temperature for summer nonetheless broadcast the summer solstice that falls three weeks into June as the first day of summer. To do so in the context of weather forecasts is nothing short of intellectually dishonest. To an unfortunate extent, those meteorologists may simply be following the herd of tradition at the expense of thinking for oneself. The human brain is suited for much more than a herd-animal mentality.
 
“What’s the difference between meteorological and astronomical seasons? These are just two different ways to carve up the year. While astronomical seasons depend on how the Earth moves around the sun, meteorological seasons are defined by the weather. [Meteorologists] break down the year into three-month seasons based on annual temperature cycles. By that calendar, spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, fall on Sept. 1 and winter on Dec. 1.”[1] Therefore, meteorologists who broadcast the summer solstice, which falls between June 20-22 depending on the year (as per leap years), as the first day of summer can be reckoned as intractable herd animals in their own profession. Distinct from the weather, as “the Earth travels around the sun, it does so at an angle relative to the sun. For most of the year, the Earth’s axis is tilted either toward or away from the sun. That means the sun’s warmth and light fall unequally on the northern and southern halves of the planet. The solstices mark the times during the year when this tilt is at its most extreme, and days and nights are at their most unequal. During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, the upper half of the earth is tilted toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between June 20 and 22.”[2] This does not signify the first day of summer in terms of climate or weather, and yet too many meteorologists continue to mislead the public by stating on a weather graphic that the first day of summer falls on the summer solstice.
At most, meteorologists should constrain themselves on the summer solstice to announcing that daylight hours are most on that day (and least on the winter solstice, which falls well into December rather than on December 1, which is the first day of winter as we know it. By June 20-22, summer as we know it here below on Earth is well underway. During that week in 2025, parts of North America and Europe were already in a heat-wave, so it would be ludicrous to claim—especially by meteorologists as they should know better—that meteorological summer has just begun. And yet the basic category mistake continued unabated.

A television station in Boston, MA misleading the public as if June 20, 2025 were the first day of meteorological summer even though the graphic itself shows a heat-wave coming up! (left). On the right, Weather.com shows the forecast high then for London, UK. Obviously, June 20, 2025 was not the first day of meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere, so the claim to the contrary by meteorologists is nothing short of puffed up ignorance based on a category mistake broadcasted publicly by people who should know better because weather is their profession. Meteorology and astronomy are distinct domains, even though they are related. Maybe meteorologists in London should have telephoned those in Boston to pass on the tip that 90F in London is well into meteorological summer rather than its first day. 

That cognitive phenomenon is aptly described by Nietzsche in regard to his infamous claim that God it dead. Even though he states that he is referring to a particular conception of God—the Abrahamic one in which God is both vengeful and omnibenevolent—he is been thought to have been an atheist. Rather, his claim that adding “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” to a deity that is omnibenevolent is to place an internal contradiction in that conception of the divine, as vengeance contradicts benevolence. The people responsible for this contradiction had no idea what they had done—their murderous act of discrediting an extant conception of the divine. Like light coming from the most distant star but not yet reaching Earth, news of their own deed did not arrive to them even as they had blood on their hands. Similarly, news of committing a category mistake has not reached the meteorologists who know that calculations regarding temperatures in a summer include June, July and August and yet broadcast that the first day of meteorological summer doesn’t “arrive” until the astronomical “summer” solstice. News of their own confusion and conflation hasn’t reached them yet, and yet their recurrent deed should be obvious to them especially, as their profession is meteorology. Perhaps astronomers could step and change the names of the astronomical “seasons”—not even using that word—so the public might realize that astronomy and meteorology are two distinct, albeit related, domains. Even astronomy is misleading in this respect in calling quadrants of the Earth’s orbit “seasons.” Therefore, I submit that the professions of both meteorologists and astronomers are at fault in enabling the confusing category mistake wherein two distinct domains are conflated. 

---

1. The Associated Press, “Sunshine Abounds as the Summer Solstice Arrives,” APnews.com, June 20, 2025.
2. Ibid.

 

RBI Overheating India’s Economy: On Materialist Greed Fueling Ceaseless Consumerism

A phenomenon as massive as the global coronavirus pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2022, is bound to have major economic ripple, or wave, effects in its wake. India’s record high 9.2% growth of GNP in the 2023-2024 fiscal year illustrates the robust thrust of pent-up demand met with increased supply. To the extent that consumption over savings is the norm in any economy, a couple years off can subtly recalibrate economic mentalities to a more prudent economic mindset wherein saving money is not so dwarfed by spending it. Moreover, putting the brakes on a consumerist routine and societal norm can theoretically lead to putting the underlying materialism in a relative rather than an absolute position and thus in perspective. Yet such a “resetting” must overcome the knee-jerk instinct of any habit to restart as if there had been no change. Coming back to college, for example, after a summer away, students tend to pick up their respective routines right away as if the recent summer were a distant memory. India’s astonishing rate of economic growth just after the pandemic demonstrates that the penchant for consumerism and economic growth as a maximizing rather than satisficing variable returned as if the steeds in Socrates’ Symposium—only those horses represent garden-variety eros sublimated to love of eternal moral verities, to which Augustine substituted “God.”

India’s central bank sought to spur economic growth in early June, 2025, by again lowering interest rates so as to increase the supply of money in the economy amid lower economic growth and inflation than anticipated. “The repo rate—the level at which the central bank lends money to commercial banks, influencing borrowing costs for home and car loans—[stood] at 5.5%, the lowest in three years.”[1] Even though India’s economy had grown by only 6.5% in the fiscal year ending in March—enough for India to still have “the world’s fastest expanding major economy”—RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra said the central bankers believes it was “imperative to stimulate domestic consumption and investment.”[2] Imperative? Such urgency and intensity point to a consumption-led approach to economics on steroids.

Although 6.5% is less than 9.2%, the economy was obviously larger in 2025 than it had been in 2022 and 2023 so the comparison is misleading in regard whether the incremental amount of GNP is sufficient cause for worry and a legitimate reason to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates yet again. I submit that both 9.2% and 6.5% are artificially high as economic growth figures in that both occurred in reaction to the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic. It was unrealistic in 2025 to expect such growth rates to continue through the remainder of the 2020s. Furthermore, stimulating from the 6.5% growth-rate risked overheating the economy, which could easily spark inflation above the central bank’s threshold, especially as inflation was so close to RBI’s 4% target—retail inflation having been 3.16% in April, 2025. The prudence of Titanic’s captain in resisting pressure from the White Star company to light the fourth boiler in order to speed up even at night with iceberg warnings having already been received seems to have eluded the bankers in India in 2025, more than a century after the floundering of the ship that could not sink.

The lack of prudence stemmed in part from a maximizing rather than a homeostatic paradigm regarding an economy. Maximizing consumption rather than holding it steady, such that surplus earnings could go into savings for a rainy day, is bound to run out of steam at some point. Lighting the fourth boiler because economic growth has dropped to a mere 6.5% is ultimately fueled by greed, which, as the desire for more, is inherently maximizing. Government in general, and a central bank in particular, functions in the public interest by channeling or resisting the excesses of greed, rather than by incessantly facilitating it. Managing a soft landing from the effects of pent-up demand from a global pandemic rather than pretending that annual growth rates of 9% are and should be sustainable reveals the great difference that exists between maturity and being oriented to instant gratification. The latter, after all, is responsible for climate change in the age of Man, and overheating an already-growing economy adds appreciably to pollution.

In short, the habit of maximizing consumption established even as a paradigm is in need of transparency and modification, lest our species go extinct from its own socio-economic mentality. Economizing need not pierce the semi-permeable, over-arching net of ecologizing forces that can protect us from ourselves if we will to exercise control over our economizing instinct. Besides doing so ourselves, governmental institutions can do so if they are not populated by the hyperextended mentality that treats increasing consumption as a perpetual end in itself.

---

1, Nikhil Inamdar, “India Central Bank Delivers Sharp Rate Cut as Growth and Inflation Fall,” BBC.com, June 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.