It’s curious … SpaceX has all the money in the world, and they didn’t hire someone who could have accurately predicted the afternoon weather in Florida on May 27, 2020.
It seems like a huge oversight, doesn’t it? And to think there are scores of nonprofit leaders and academics in Washington, DC, who can accurately predict global temperatures 10, 15, even 50 years into the future.
Oh, stop it with the “climate isn’t weather” rebuttal. It’s trite and silly. The guys who say “food isn’t cuisine” is a food critic, and by default, haughty and obnoxious.
How about this one: science isn’t semantics.
We all wish we could predict the future. Intellectually, empirically, rationally, we know we can’t, but some still try.
Throughout Washington, DC, where I live, in addition to the elite intelligentsia, the kind who read their own books on the NY-bound Acela, are multiple Tarot Card readers and psychics offering their services of clairvoyance.
And we hear the stories. The buddy who picked a good stock because “he was sure” it would go up. Or the other guy who proclaims, “I just knew the Nationals would win the World Series.”
It’s not true. Not possible. Not even logically defensible. It’s syntax, not the truth.
We make decisions for the future, not based on preternatural intelligence, but data. Market trends and balance sheets guide stock picks, but there’s no certainty the price will go up.
Wouldn’t we all be rich if that were the case? In baseball, injuries, rotation and roster, and team loyalty form our hunches, but there’s no guarantee your team will win.
No one “knew” the weather would cancel the SpaceX flight, but rather scientists used data to make the best-educated guess which is part of the scientific method we learned about in third grade.
And similarly, no one “knows” what will happen to the earth in 5, 10, 15, 50 years because of climate change. So quite frankly I’m tired of hearing about it.
Now I’ll answer that next question before you ask it: no, there is no data which says the world temperatures will rise to an uninhabitable level. There are models, and models are very, very human.
Climate change models are computer generated and the code is written by biased individuals. It’s not scientific following rigorous methodology; it’s prediction, based on available data, which may or may not be accurate.
Remember the model which predicted 2.2 million deaths from Coronavirus?
Whoopsie.
Garbage in, garbage out, just like in every other computer-generated scenario. Maybe one day the Artificial Intelligence will actually be intelligent and correct the programmer, but for now, it’s just following the program as written by the very fallible human.
This is why the outrage at Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comment “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Not because it’s stupid (it is), not because it’s wrong (it is), but because it’s so deliberately misleading.
It is a perfect example of speculation turned into fact and for the sole purpose of pushing a political agenda, which just makes it an affront to my wallet. It dumbs down discourse.
It turns off reasonable people like me who do this for a living. There’s little point in having a conversation about climate change or mankind’s contribution or lack thereof to it.
Yet, more and more government policy is crafted and tax dollars are spent based on this type of illogical thinking.
Climate is the great unknown, and politicians and the media love to scare the crap out of regular Americans by feigning some great insight into tomorrow making us quiver in our seats.
Climate change will kill us. Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s said that overpopulation would mean England would cease to exist by 2000. England!
Poor Queen, like she doesn’t have enough on her royal plate. Al Gore 20 years ago predicted no Arctic ice, and he got an Oscar for it.
Last I checked both the UK and the Arctic ice are fine, shapes of both changing constantly. These were predictions of fact. They were models, based on data, meant to scare and push an agenda.
We can’t even predict a few weeks into the future. On March 20 of this year, the Washington Post predicted an “abnormally warm spring” across the entire country using models based on data (winter temperatures, polar vortex) presented as fact including an ominous “this may be a first.”
Scary global warming type stuff. Yikes.
A month after that article ran, the same author in the same publication pointed out that DC had already been experiencing below-average temperatures for two weeks, meaning the doomsday article couldn’t’ even foresee 2 weeks ahead.
A few days later, the same publication acknowledged weather 1-2 degrees below average that was likely to continue.
Huh.
Then the same Washington Post puts out an article with the title “Exceptionally Cold Weather for May Arrives Tonight with Near Freezing Temperatures and Bitter Wind Chills.”
The following day they wrote about Washington, DC, hitting its coldest day in more than a decade and Baltimore its coldest day on record saying May had temperatures 25 degrees below average.
What gives? It’s simple: the first article, the scary, scary climate change article, was based on models (but presented as fact).
The subsequent “holy crap it’s cold” articles were based on…facts. Which are not as scary, and not as much fun.
Will the world end because of climate change? I don’t know. Will the seas rise and the lakes boil? I don’t know. And you know what, neither does anyone else.
Read more at Daily Caller
Excellent Daniel but wander this published in this venue a while back. Michael Crichton sadly, sadly RIP at an early age. From State of Fear below:
Let’’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium sized sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.
The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on because the planet was so hot. Then as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen, The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.
Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.
And for the last seven hundred thousand years the planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.
And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.
Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lighting bolts strike the earth every second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.
The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.
The reality is, they run from the storms.
Great article, love the comment above. This very thing has been my argument for years. Living on the Gold Coast in my retirement partly meant learning our areas weather and our local “lay of the land”, Over this past 5 years I have been frequently puzzled by huge storm warning for an afternoon, with damaging hail, strong winds etc for our afternoon and it all passed without a cloud or a drop of rain. How on earth can anyone even entertain the concept of knowing what the weather will be like in 2100 smacks of sheer fantasy,
I laugh (it keeps me from crying) every time the local weather forecasters tell us what’s gonna happen over the next several days. It’s all a fantasy with the forecasts seldom are correct a few days in the future and are frequently wrong for even the following day. I joke with my wife especially about their snow predictions where we got 10″ of partly cloudy or we got a dusting from the predicted foot of snow. This is on the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies so those mountains do make predictions more difficult but what really bugs me is that they never come back the next day and say “Never Mind!”
Sounds like you’re listening to a forecast for Brisbane. A north-easter in the morning – and watch the clouds build around Cunninghams Gap. The wind in the arvo swings 180° – and the storm comes in about 5pm. Hail on a corrugated iron roof is noisy. (That was in Tennyson – 1950’s and 60’s. If you get to Boomerang Land, toss one for me.)
The following is from “Science & Mechanics” magazine, August 1974, page 88.
(Quote)
Any attempt to predict the future stands on very shaky ground. In spite of a steady improvement in the sophistication of future-predicting techniques — from cattle entrails to crystal balls to computers — our ability to predict even the short-term future remains poor, indeed. Observe what happened to President Nixon in the four months from November 1972 to March 1973. Anyone who talks about what life will be like in 30, or 100, or 1,000 years from now is talking nonsense.
This is so because of three reasons:
1) There are facts to be discovered about our world which are unknown today.
2) Even if we knew all the facts, there is nobody with wisdom enough to understand how all of them are related and interact with one another.
3) Even if we knew all the facts, and how they interact with each other, there is the additional and most important obstacle to future-prediction: Social, political, economic, legal and military considerations often override the scientific and technological information.
(End quote)
And these are probibly the same kind of screwballs who consult their Horrorscopes before they leave their homes each day