Harper’s Folly

Had he not been eaten, the boy who cried “Wolf!” would have grown up to be a meteorologist.
Winter storm “Harper” was a bust. Predictions of 1-2 feet of snow made over days as the storm approached and repeated hours before it hit were off by a factor of four. Long after it was obvious to anyone looking out a window that we weren’t going to get accumulations approaching a foot the weather-hype continued. Perhaps Aesop’s fable of the ill-fated shepherd boy should be taught at metrological school.
Back before snow storms were given names (when we just called it “winter in New Hampshire”) predications were often wrong. But they weren’t so misleading. There seems to be little relationship between advances in weather predicting technologies – satellites, doppler radar, computer models – and accuracy, especially for major weather events.
Being a cynic, I think the monetary motive is at play here. Big news drives viewership. Twenty-four-hour weather channels need their equivalent of “If it bleeds it leads” to pique viewer interest and drive ad revenue. And as we’ve seen in the news business, there is little downside to getting the story spectacularly wrong. “Look – a squirrel!” and last week’s transgression is forgotten, no forgiveness required.
But I’m not a total cynic. I recognize that mathematical models of complex systems like weather have limits, regardless of the modeler’s intentions. Predictions are just that – forecasts of a possible future based on available data and experience. And when people’s lives could be at stake, it is better to err on the side of caution. Nobody wants a school bus full of kids skidding off into a snowbank.
We all understand the limits of weather prediction because we live it in near-real time and can adjust our behaviors accordingly. The downside of closing school for a day or postponing a sales meeting simply isn’t that great. But when the downside includes wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars, diverting resources away from pressing needs today to “fix” an unknowable future, hobbling our economy in the process and consigning millions of Americans to unemployment lines, the cost of being wrong is unacceptable.
Yet that’s exactly what the bullies of “settled science” climate change advocate.
In current parlance, “climate change” is a poor short-hand for the evidence-free faith that mankind’s Industrial-Age release of carbon dioxide is going to destroy the planet unless SOMETHING DRASTIC IS DONE NOW! We’ve been reading these predictions for decades, seeing deadlines come and go. Since nothing drastic has been done, the calamities that didn’t happened are excused away, pushed out to just over the horizon because of some new magic (like the “ocean heat sink” theory) that explains away previous failures.
The cartoonish Representative from NY’s 14th Congressional District (dubbed by one clear-thinking pundit as “Occasional-Cortex”) uttered yet another climate-change inanity last week that deserves to be quoted in full:
“I think that the part of it that is generational is that millennials and Gen-Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ and your biggest issue is–your biggest issue is, ‘How are we going to pay for it?’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And, like, this is the war; this is our World War II.”
If Guinness creates a world record for “Most Wrong Human on Earth” AOC would surely be a contender. But she joins a decades-long line of people making insanely wrong predictions on climate change and the consequences that will befall us. My personal favorite is Al Gore’s 2008 Nostradamian “The entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in 5 years.”
Weather is not climate but predicting each requires models – complex mathematical representations of systems we don’t understand nearly well enough. Weather systems have far fewer unknown variables than our global climate system, and weather predictions are of much shorter duration. The fact that climate-doomsdayers keep finding new magic to add to their model as each prediction fails is proof that their science is anything but “settled.”
Models are only useful if they provide predictive accuracy. Weather models with their near-real-time feedback are useful, with caveats. Climate models that purport to predict global temperature increases to a tenth of a degree over decades using limited historic “temperature” data derived largely from ice core samples and tree rings are beyond useless. When used as political weapons, they are dangerous.
Global climate is changing – and has been since before man discovered fire. Scientists simply don’t have a way of making meaningful – i.e., provable – predictions about it. Until they do, demands that we significantly alter how we live are not supportable scientifically. Such demands are based on cultish faith and monetary self-interest. There’s money being made in being wrong about the climate.
On second thought, maybe the boy who cried “Wolf!” would have grown up to be a government-funded climatologist.