John Anderton: Why’d you catch that?
Danny Witwer: Because it was going to fall.
John Anderton: You’re certain?
Danny Witwer: Yeah.
John Anderton: But it didn’t fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.[From Minority Report]
“Prediction is hard, especially about the future.” – Attributed to Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, but so are a lot of other things.
Once again, Mike Miles provides a striking graphic:
Similar data is available about the Antarctic ice sheet and the world’s icebergs. Once seasonal effects are accounted for, the aggregate of global ice is stable. Global temperature readings have fluctuated in a strangely stable fashion these past few decades as well, despite ever-increasing human and natural emissions of the “greenhouse” gases. But the warmistas are unrelenting; they persist in claiming that Earth will become too hot to sustain life unless we all turn down our thermostats and don heavy woolen hair shirts right now!
None of their near-term forecasts of doom have proved correct. A record like that ought to disqualify them from serious attention. Even so, they continue to command attention and large amounts of money. Someone must have an interest in promoting their scare talk.
The squib above from Minority Report is relevant. Near-term predictions are easier to make, and have a better record of accuracy, than long-term ones. Genuine experts understand this, which makes them cautious about long-term claims. In this regard, economists divide into two groups: the cautious ones, and the Marxists.
The basis of true expertise is a record of accurate predictions. True experts know it.
We’ve suffered a number of bedevilments-by-expert the last few years. The most egregious one is the most recent: the predictions of “COVID doom” from figures in the fields of epidemiology and pharmacology. Please, God: May it be a long, long time before we forget what that cost us.
The media have been hugely complicit, of course. Without those giant megaphones to broadcast the prophecies of doom at a million decibels, the scare talk would go nowhere. The dynamic there is obvious: lurid stories about impending calamity draw the “eyeballs” better than sober, measured statements that concede the difficulties of prediction and the fallibility of experts.
A few memories:
- The doom-scenario of the Seventies was “global cooling:” a new ice age.
- Wild predictions were made for the “harmonic convergence.”
- Acid rain would destroy our forests.
- Chlorinated Fluorocarbons would destroy the ozone layer.
- Ocean dumping would kill all the cetaceans and most of the fish.
- The Paddock brothers predicted that half the world would starve.
- Comet Kohoutek presaged the Second Coming.
- At midnight on 01/01/2000, all the computers would melt down.
- Logging in the Amazon jungle would asphyxiate us.
- Wasn’t there something about killer bees?
- And who could forget Paul Ehrlich?
None of those predictions came true. Yet those who made them continue to receive respect as “experts.” It makes me feel a certain sympathy for Jeane Dixon and The Amazing Criswell.
Not long ago, attorney and essayist Christopher Roach advised us to “Be skeptical. Being skeptical is a superpower.” (I gave that a place in the LIS Codex.) Given the persistent failure of the doomsayers’ predictions, you’d think we’d have learned a little skepticism by now. But such is the human need for an occasional zing! to the central nervous system that our ears continue to prick up at each fresh prediction of doom. And so the tabloids arrayed at the supermarkets’ check-out counters continue to enjoy brisk sales.
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It’s funny you mentioned that exchange from Minority Report…. recall that Spock, in Amok Time, says something to the effect of ‘If I drop a hammer on a high-grav (sic) planet, I do not need to see it hit the ground to know it will fall’.
My favourite, though, is the ancient Chinese saying, ‘I do not require proof, for it is obvious’.
Important things, hiding in plain sight, are not always visible to the credulous.
We can ass RFK to the list. Diet won’t cure or prevent all our diseases. I wish it would. I am in favor improving our diet, especially in school lunches. Have you seen American school lunches? Take a few moments from your busy schedule and research Japanese school lunches, it will make you sad with shame for our school lunch program. But one of the problems every discussion about what is good and what is bad in our diet always devolves into personal and often bizarre biases. The experts cannot tell us what is “good”. Often they will fall back on that over used phrase “processed foods”. As in processed foods are bad and natural foods are good. But then some wise guy creates a list of the chemicals in an apple and honestly it is scary. And the point of that is all “processed” foods are required by law to have a list of chemicals while natural foods are not and it is the list that is scary. Don’t get me wrong I am in favor of removing red dye #4 from our foods if it is bad for you, but is it? I don’t know. The experts don’t know. The only ones that know coincidently wear tin foil hats and think all vaccines cause autism. To put it in the simplest terms no one agrees on what a good diet is. All of the experts say different things. The science it settled, i.e. the scientists don’t know.
The problem with that graphic about arctic ice being 26% more than it was in 2012 is that it could be a random event that was cherry-picked because someone likes the look – which is the exact problem we’re fighting with all the warming claims. You rarely see anything that examines the accuracy of their predictions. To quote Barbie, “math is hard.”
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There are people who want to shut down the west and kill off 95% of humanity for predicted degree of temperature rise, when the only studies of the error range on that prediction say it could warm by 25 degrees or cool by 15. The prediction is meaningless.
I have to say that given that we KNOW that A) the Earth has been both much cooler and much warmer than it is now, all within the past thousand years (from growing grapes in England to Europe’s Little Ice Age); and B) Earth is still recovering from the recent Ice Age, much less running in a Warm Interglaciation, I can’t get particularly excited about predictions of the weather a century from now. Let’s face it, it’s a 50/50 shot whether the weather “professionals” get it right within +/- 2 degrees F (1 degrees C) for a prediction involving next WEEK. The only promises to cure all these cold snaps/warm snaps have in common are “give us money and power and we’ll fix it”.
But what about the mortal danger posed by dihydrogen oxide? Did you know that this chemical covers 70% of the entire surface of Earth? What shall we do? What can we do? We’re all gonna die! Unless you give me all your money to initiate the massive changes needed to remedy the situation, that is.
And I would be remiss if I did not point out that The Bible prescribes a very effective method for dealing with false prophets. Deuteronomy 18: 20. Highly recommended. Highly effective.