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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-12-16

If They Can't Even Predict The Next Season Right . . . 

. . . how in the world can they be expected to predict the next 100 years right?

Back in August I wrote about the NOAA's hurricane forecast for the season ahead.

Hurricane researcher William Gray lowered his 2007 forecast slightly Friday, calling for 15 named storms, with eight becoming hurricanes and four of those becoming intense.

This, of course, was a revision of the position he had taken just ten weeks earlier:

On May 31, at the outset of hurricane season, Mr. Gray had expected 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense.

Well, just in case you're interested, the final numbers are in:

THE 2007 HURRICANE SEASON PRODUCED FOURTEEN NAMED STORMS...OF WHICH SIX BECAME HURRICANES...WITH TWO OF THE HURRICANES ATTAINING MAJOR HURRICANE (CATEGORY THREE OR HIGHER ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON HURRICANESCALE) STATUS.

Soooo . . . .from 17 down to 15, and finally it was 14; from 9 down to 8, and finally it was 6; and from 5 down to 4, finally producing 2.

On the number of storms, a margin of error of almost 20%; on number of hurricanes, a margin of error of 33%; and on the number of serious storms, an MOE of 60%. Even when you factor in the revised numbers, the MOEs are 6%, 25%, and 50%.

All I know is my old Physics teacher would have thrown out any lab report I turned in with that sort of margin of error.

And yet, there is an entire cottage industry formed around the assumption that we have any idea what's going to happen in 50 or 100 years, when the best mind in the business can't get all that close to predicting the next six months.

As I wrote last night, it's time for somebody on our side to start pushing back against the Church of Global Warming.
Posted by: Michael / 12/16/2007 12:29:00 AM

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