Most of us know almost nothing about anything. We get things wrong all the time. We jump to conclusions. We get facts mixed up. We hear it wrong in the first place.

But compared to professional weather forecasters, we are all prophets inspired by Providence.

In theory, we long ago entered an age in which reliable weather reports are the norm. Satellite images, and all. The new and old hardware that make this a science, not an art — or a shot in the (not predicted) dark.

I gave more than a little thought to weather during the reading of Isaac’s Storm, a book that appeared in 2000, written by Erik Larson.

The book posits that the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, the hurricane that pounded Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and killed approximately 8,000 people, would have exacted a far small death toll had the local weatherman (the Isaac in the book’s title) been competent and/or attentive.

Isaac Cline was the U.S. Weather Bureau’s chief meteorologist in Galveston from 1889 to 1901, and in 1891 he wrote in a local newspaper that the thought of a hurricane ever doing any serious harm to Galveston was “a crazy idea”.

According to Larson, the U.S. Weather Bureau, which in 1900 was getting things wrong a lot, and fighting to remain funded by Congress, refused to pay proper attention to reports out of Cuba that an unnamed hurricane was heading for Texas — and not up the eastern seaboard of the U.S., as usually is the case. That led to Galveston being almost completely unprepared when the hurricane slammed into it.

Since that book, I have been paying more attention to the weather reports here in the Languedoc region of France, and marveling at how often France’s meteorologists are wrong. Badly wrong.

We watch at least three weather reports in the time frame from 7:30 p.m. till 9 p.m., one of them local, two of them national, and the best way to learn what the next day’s weather here will be like is to get out of bed in the morning and look outside.

Rain? Sun? Clouds? French weather people can’t get it right. They always have an opinion, of course, but it turns out it is not much more than that.

We have learned to ignore local weather when it comes to outings because the night before … nobody actually knows what things will be like.

(It gets even worse, for French forecasting. They inevitably do a seven-day forecast, and the odds of them being right on the second day are remote, and on the seventh day pure guesswork.)

Granted, I may expect more from weather forecasters, given that most of my time has been spent in Southern California and Abu Dhabi, where predicting what tomorrow will look like is no great achievement. “More sun” covers about 300 days a year.

Still, Languedoc is not exactly a place of crazy weather swings. Not like those U.S. states such as Colorado (and others) where the saying goes: “If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.”

Temperatures in this part of France rarely change more than five degrees Fahrenheit, from day to day. This winter, for instance, has mostly been about a slight rise in temperatures. Spring, and all.

All we hope for are basics: Will it rain? Will there be sun? How hard will the wind blow?”

If an weather entity cannot tell me that about 16 hours ahead of the event … they are not much good at all, are they?

Those weather satellites help a lot when it comes to major events, like hurricanes. Well, duh. You have a photo in your hand of a huge storm moving along.

It’s the everyday that is the problem. The storm that vanishes, or materializes. The wind that goes from dead to brisk. Half a day from right this minute.

We concede that weather can change up in an hour or two.

I would like meteorologists to concede a bit more often that, most days, tomorrow’s forecast is pretty much guesswork.

They also should consider a caveat at the bottom of the screen: “This is the best prediction of the weather service, but we are not responsible for getting it wrong … again.