Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Truth vs. Bumper-Sticker Scientism

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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.

Crackpot Morons: “Weather Control”

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Hurricane Helene, and now the ongoing Milton, have brought the tinfoil-hat crazies out of the woodwork on social media like the mentally deficient cockroaches they are. What’s mentally deficient? Combining a pathetic lack of scientific education (thanks a lot, American public schools) with still worse critical-thinking skills, and a level of gullibility that make con men the world over foam at the mouth. The result? Patently idiotic crap like this, which somehow gets likes, clicks and attention. I’ll not give these attention-starved crackpots the glory of linking to their page nor YouTube channel.

This keeps coming up, over and over for many years, like flies on turds, and no matter how many times truth swats away the flies, more keep returning.

Here is the truth, from an expert radar meteorologist (me) who has reviewed tens of thousands of radar images over my nearly 40 years in meteorology, as a student (the first four under the tutelage of world-renowned NSSL radar expert Don Burgess) then full-time operational meteorologist. I have published several formal and conference papers dealing with radar analysis and interpretation. Furthermore, I quite possibly have published more lead-authored formal peer-reviewed papers total (ten) than any full-time forecaster in U.S. history, with many more as a coauthor. It’s not bragging if it’s the truth. Now, with that out of the way…

These are rings of lower-atmospheric and ground returns around radar sites. You can see the centers of them at places like Springfield, Wichita, Tulsa (Inola), Kansas City (Pleasant Hill), Norman and many others. They are normal and common every night when radar waves are directed downward off temperature inversions to bounce off bugs, bats, birds, and all kinds of objects on the ground, and enough of the bounced signal returns to the antenna to be detected.

That’s it! That’s all! It really is that simple. No sinister agenda, no “geoengineering”. The radiation (10-cm microwaves weakening fast at distances of miles) cannot “change the weather”. They only can bounce off targets dense enough and return a tiny fraction of their original, already weakening power.

Elected officials can be morons about it too.

Who specifically is “they”? Where is your proof? You don’t have any. Busted liar! Margie, as a conservative, I see your behavior here as an embarrassment to conservatism and as desperate, opportunistic attention-seeking clickbait of the worst order. You know nothing of this topic; sit down and shut up. [Damn right I told a woman to sit down and shut up, no apologies. Get over it, wokes. That’s because it has nothing to do with her gender, and everything to do with her acting as dumb as a brick. She’d get the very same treatment if she were a dude, and her name was Marty. Now that’s real “equality”!]

Cloud seeding, despite how often and worldwide it has been tried (and still is), can work on very small, controlled scales in lab freezers. It is not proven to work versus unseeded clouds in the real, vast, chaotic atmosphere. Why? You can’t have a control group. Because of that, there’s no way to prove whether rain did or did not fall as a direct result of seeding. Extensively published research meteorologist Chuck Doswell has written an excellent summary of the seeding issue. Read that. Learn something.

As for Project Stormfury? That was an experimental attempt to seed hurricanes and change their rainfall patterns to reduce flooding. It failed. How? Results were inclusive to nil, for one, and for another (again), there were no “control hurricanes” of identical nature to compare against.

As for lasers, powerful, experimental ones have been shown to produce enough plasma to redirect a lightning flash down a path of lesser resistance, basically acting as a lightning rod. That isn’t “weather control”, anymore than lightning-current redirection through the walls of my house, by my rod-and-cable system, is “weather control”. What a load of crap. You’d need more power than mankind can muster to have even one hour’s chance of matching the energy in a hurricane.

Give these “weather control” sites, posts and videos no attention, and debunk them whenever possible with your gullible friends. They prey on ignorance and a terrible lack of scientific education in this nation.

Notice I am NOT for censorship of them. Instead, the way to react to bad ideas is with better ideas (truth). This is that, at least to the extent I feel like addressing the stupidity.

Yes, it doesn’t help that numerous real, damaging, cruel and/or otherwise evil governmental conspiracies have been done against citizens. That has set the plate for any cockamamie idea to seem legit. But that doesn’t mean they are!

While I realize critical, scientific thinking is in short supply, again, thanks to generally woeful standards to which far too many public-school students have been held, it is needed more than ever. In an age when kooks of all political spectra think “they” can control the weather, that essential oils can resolve cancer or any other disease in particular, that mineral crystals or planetary alignments somehow impart a power in one’s life, that GMO is deadly (when it in fact has helped agricultural productivity and saved millions from starvation), when a genetic and anthropological male with XY chromosomes can ridiculously claim to be female simply via self-declaration (yeah, and when I was a kid, I was Superman too)…we have, as a society, lost our grip on reason, logic, statistical numeracy (outliers don’t disprove the rule!), and rationalism. We need to get them back. We live in a sea of gullible, hapless suckers for any cockamamie idea.

AI in Weather Forecasting (Not the Last)

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This is the first, likely not last, entry in this here ol’ BLOG that will be devoted to the use of artificial intelligence (AI), including machine-learning output, in forecasting. If you want scientifically vetted, peer-reviewed documentation of some of what I’m talking about, check out:
* Random forests for short-fused applications
* Using random forests to derive day-2 probabilities from CAM ensembles
* Random forests at various severe-day periods

Both public- and private-sector AI usage and claims are presented in this fairly presented Washington Post article.

As someone who uses, and oversees the use of, a set of AI-informed tools as a part of the daily forecast regimen, I’ll state this is not something to be afraid of, nor to lazily and mindlessly use as a crutch.

To address the fear factor—a lot of that is rooted in the black-box aspect Schumacher has discussed. He and other university and lab researchers (such as Loken) have published peer-reviewed papers (see above) discussing how their methodologies work, in reproducible ways. They’re in AMS journals, to which we in NWS have ready access. So don’t be afraid, be informed.

Admittedly it’s harder to be informed on the private-sector black boxes, because they are unscientific in the sense of not being reproducible and peer reviewed. They’re hidden behind a “proprietary” shroud of secrecy—the very antithesis of science! All you see are results—typically only the cherry-picked best, of course, with perhaps a token minor failure if the presenter is allowed to reveal such. But we don’t really know fully where those are consistently weak, due to (again!) lack of peer-reviewed documentation with reproducible methodologies, analyses and results. Caveat emptor!

To the second point (tools, not crutches), this is another in a long line of beneficial advancements in improving the forecasts overall. They add confidence, for example, to SPC day-3+ areas, but the forecaster does not just mindlessly “draw around them”. Meteorological reasoning still must be used, and discussed, by the outlook forecaster. The more uncommon a scenario is, the less the machine learning is trained on situations like them, and the more they’ll miss, even in an ensemble sense. Bulk statistical verification of AI-based forecasts may look great, but smooths over the outliers, which tend to be disproportionately destructive and important. And there’s still the “garbage in garbage out” factor, mainly due to lack of high-density upper-air obs here and even surface obs in much of the world, that renders uncertainty and output spread in ensembles right from the start.

AI/ML-informed models are imperfect, especially for the rare events that most depend on our own physical understanding as meteorologists to tease out. Lose that understanding, and we might as well be automatons regurgitating models. That might be “good enough for government work” most of the time, maybe even accidentally excellent sometimes.

Yet for anyone tempted to steer that direction, in a personal or policy sense, I offer these sobering and disturbing words:

Air France 447.