science communication

This is an example of AI slop in weather communications. Let’s look just at the graphic, while trying not to laugh at the casual editorial laziness involved in leaving the “(398 characters)” tag in the text description. 🫣

AI Slop Cloud Formations

Each cloud-type illustration is overly sharp-edged and so idealized as to be rather unrealistic for the human observer to expect. The stratus illustration is hardly “flat”, but instead quite deeply textured in both form and grayscale shading. [In fact, it most closely resembles the altocumulus undulatus cloud type and not stratus, given the wavy character and somewhat convective (as opposed to stratiform) tops.] Nimbostratus will not have such crisp, cauliflower-like turrets visible immediately above. Not all Cumulonimbi produce lightning (and therefore thunder), and almost never have overshooting tops covering such a large percentage of such an obviously small and young anvil area.

Since complaints are fairly worthless without solutions, here is a solution: use actual photographs of clouds to illustrate the types, as has been done for decades in both printed and online cloud atlases and posters. This validates authenticity (as long as the description is accurate, of course).

Weather photographers have covered this realm for a very long time! And if the presenter is too cheap or lazy to license photographers’ work, most cloud types have typically lower-quality, but still often usable, public-domain imagery available for the cost of some search effort.

Here is my own online “Mini Cloud Atlas” of a lot of different cloud forms. The cloud gallery and entire SkyPix site are searchable by name of cloud type, or click on keywords at the bottom of each image page.

https://skypix.photography/category/mini-cloud-atlas/

Quite often the subject of social-media memes, this is a well-known quote from a media-friendly astrophysicist of considerable fame.

“The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is a terrible quote and meme. Neil Tyson, of all people, should know better.

Instead, this is a typically haughty, shallow, bumper-sticker level of “new atheist” scientism, and way off-base anyway.

Science has been wrong and/or incomplete countless many times, and still is. Otherwise, there would be nothing more to do, no ideas worth change, and nothing to improve.

If science were categorically “true”, we’d never need retractions, nor corrigenda, nor errata, nor revisions, nor shifts in thinking from one explanatory theory to another. Done right, science continually updates what we thought could be true, or partway there, to something closer to the truth. But science is nonlinear, zig-zaggy, mistake-prone as humans are, and sometimes leads us into dead ends from which we have to backtrack before moving forward again.

I call bullshit on that quote, the arrogant attitude behind it and the implication that science monopolizes truth. I’ve had Tyson apologists respond stuff to the effect of, “He didn’t mean it…”. Then he shouldn’t have said it! Say what you mean, and mean what you say. For someone making a living as a science communicator, this was terrible communication, if unintended. I think it was intended. If not: communicate better. Talking down to your audience is hardly a way to garner attention needed for evoking better understanding by said audience.

Instead of “true”, I see science as an amazing, God-given pathway to understanding His infinite developments better and better by the year.

We should be humble enough to understand that complete truth is beyond our means and abilities, and that science is but one way of learning on the journey toward our ultimate destination.

Instead the meme should say: “The good thing about science is that it is iteratively self-correcting.”

I am fortunate enough to be a published natural scientist, in my case meteorology instead of astrophysics (though I did take an astrophysics course in college…it was fun and enlightening!). I strive not to be perfect, nor to know all that’s “true” (only God does), nor to be better than thou, but instead, to build upon the already substantial and imperfect understanding we have of some small part of our universe — in my case, dangerous weather. Sure, I may know more about severe weather than >99% of the population, through study, direct observation, research, and forecast experience. I’m considered an expert. And yet, my knowledge of it is, to use a vaguely theological theme, still but a single grain of sand on the seashore of understanding. Atmospheric-science ideas I may treat as “true” now may be amended a little or a lot, or even exterminated, upon future discovery and/or analysis. Good! That, friends, is science.

Nearly 35 years of full-time science to my name, and a lot of forecasts and research papers (per our respective CVs, twice as many lead-authored formal papers as NDGT, despite my being a full-time, shift-rotating forecaster the whole time), one thing I can say with great confidence that our science still has much to learn and much to improve. Otherwise your forecasts would be on the mark all the time, even though they are a lot better than 35 years ago! I hope my peers and I have helped to steer it on a truer course, even if its “truth” is far from perfect or complete, or has been the case often throughout history, not true upon further study, and requiring revision.