The statistical evidence series will continue after the weekend.
“I see the letter G.” The woman closed her eyes, cocked her head, and looked inwardly. She became grave, tense. “There’s…wait a second…it’s coming through…yes! I can just make out a body of water nearby.” She settled back, opened her eyes, a wide smile overcoming the frown. She waited for the applause that was sure to come.
The woman? A psychic telling a distraught family where the body of their daughter can be found. Or maybe an activist making guesses of where the next global warming calamity will occur. The two aren’t that far apart. Here’s why.
The New York Post reports that a “clairvoyant” was hired by the family of “Melissa Barthelemy, 24, of Buffalo”, who had gone missing. Police suspected foul play. The unnamed psychic was reported to have said she saw Melissa’s “body buried in a shallow grave overlooking a body of water.” Weirdly, the seer also predicted that there would be the letter “‘G’ in a sign nearby.”
Sadly, but also—let’s admit it—somewhat thrillingly, the police found Melissa where the psychic said she would be. And not just Melissa, a horrific mass grave in which “cops unearthed the skeletons of the victims, missing call girls, each wrapped in burlap bags on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach.” Long Island’s Gilgo Beach! There’s the body of water! There’s the G!
The evidence tells us the psychic was right. Therefore, the psychic is psychic; that is, this person (we don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman; I’ll assume it’s a woman) must have the powers she said she does. If you want to say it in a complicated way, the “body of water” and the “G” confirm the theory that paranormal powers exist.
And this is true: the evidence does indeed confirm the paranormal theory. If you’re a skeptic of psi powers, you might not like this conclusion, but that can’t be helped. When a theory predicts an event will happen, and if that event happens, that theory is confirmed to the degree the predicted events match the reality.
Are we done? As John Wayne would say, Not hardly. For that same body of water and “G” also confirm the theory that the psychic is just guessing, and for obvious reasons. Melissa was a Long Island resident, and Long Island is filled with rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, cisterns, swimming pools; even a well known ocean is nearby. There is virtually no place that is not “near” a body of water. And the “G”? Well, anything with “Long Island” will qualify (can you locate the “G”?). Then there are gas stations, various “ings”, etc., etc. There was almost no way that the psychic could have been wrong. Her supporters will never suffer disappointment.
Unspecific predictions also plague the global warming forecasts of activists. I don’t mean all predictions of climate change, some of which are quite detailed. I have in mind those colorfully vivid sayings of doom given out by green organizations, typically in appeals for donations. These overly earnest folks say that if we don’t “do something”, bad things will occur. Near a body of water, usually.
Those who have “We have to save the planet!” ever on their lips are ready to interpret any untoward event as evidence that their worst fears are realized. Remember the Indonesian tsunami? That was near a body of water, and more than one activist was ready to blame it on mankind; some especially clever agitators were even able to point to global warming. This year’s cold and snow in the States? Global warming, too. Poverty in the third word? Climate change. A lot of racism is caused by the climate chaos, too. More prostitutes, pimps, and pirates? Reliance of fossil fuels.
People will always be creative enough to tie any environmentally bad thing—never, of course, good things—to the theory that mankind is responsible. Just as with psychics, whatever happens will be confirmation that their beliefs are true. They will not, so to speak, see that bodies of water are everywhere. This is why it is so difficult to convince the True Believer that his angst is misplaced.
For a more in-depth look at a psychic supposedly helping detectives solve a murder, see the Tabitha Horn case.
Speaking of predictions, I had a premonition of an upcoming article from you. It had something like “Part IV” and and another word with the letter “P” in it. Some of the letters in the article may be blue and some may be italicized. WAIT! ! There’s something else …. Oh, yeah! You live near a body of water. Some of the nearby land is completely surrounded by it.
What amazes me is that the true believers are convinced the climate modelers know how to write a computer program that can forecast the climate a century from now. Now, that’s faith. Years ago I was using a computer program to evaluate some differential equations numerically and found that it is easy to produce incorrect results. We used to joke “garbage in, gospel out” because people would believe the computer output even when it was nonsense.
An interesting example of a non-specific prediction comes to us from the United States Global Change Research Program (http://globalchange.gov/). In their discussion of Regional Climage Impacts: Great Plains, we’re told that, “The Great Plains is characterized by strong
seasonal climate variations. Over thousands of years, records preserved in tree rings, sediments, and sand deposits provide evidence of recurring periods of extended drought (such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s) alternating with wetter conditions.”
Out of these strong seasonal climate variations, scientists have been able to tease out a 1.5 degree F increase in average annual temperature (compared to the 1960 – 1979 baseline period).
Now we get to the Psychics vs. Global Warming Activist predictions for the future. The earliest prediction that we will be able to check is for “about” (they use a little tilde thing on the chart) 2020 when temperatures “are likely to be” between 0.3 degrees F cooler than today to about 2.2 degrees F warmer than today. So about nine years from now, temperatures will probably be cooler or warmer than now. Now there’s a stake in the ground.
The chart is here.
http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/great-plains.pdf
Further to globalchange.gov, if you look at the bottom of the home page, you’ll see logos from Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Interior, State, Transportation, HHS, and Agriculture plus NASA, NSF, USAID, EPA and The Smithsonian Institution. So much for separation of church and state.
Actually, the letter “G” is subliminally based on the very thing that makes faithful adherence to the AGW meme instinctively compelling for so many intelligentsia. The “G” stands for the “guilt” their mothers imbued into their developing psyches for almost two decades. If one’s mother says he’s guilty of something then he must somehow be at fault. And if one can’t recall the specific transgression then it has to be generic to all mankind; ergo: AGW and its offspring fit right in. It is true because mother was never wrong.
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“Unspecific predictions also plague” many other sciences. We can just look at astrophysics, The most obvious item is that so called “dark matter” is a complete fiction. There is a short list of other fictions in science if we care to look at them.
You have absolutely summed up my first, last and foremost problem with climate forecasting. I smelt a rat as soon as I realized there was a forecast for every outcome and it was just a matter of retrospecitively elevating it for attention. It’s like having the whole deck of cards concealed about your person so you can whip out the right one to “prove” you guessed your audience’s choice correctly.
@Eric — Cannot imagine though, that you would be called a “dark matter denier” by the astrophysics “consensusâ€.
Consider passing this, and similar, blog essays to the JREF — they’ve solicited inputs:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1193-we-want-you-call-for-submissions-to-the-randiorg-blog.html
The e-mail contact is: blog@randi.org
Chances are good that, given J. Randi’s reduced involvement, you’ll get a nice response that would serve as a good follow-up!
49er: If one’s mother says he’s guilty of something then he must somehow be at fault. And if one can’t recall the specific transgression then it has to be generic to all mankind; ergo: AGW and its offspring fit right in. It is true because mother was never wrong.
Actually, if one can’t recall the specific transgression it is proof of a repressed memory and only hypnotic therapy will bring it out. Expensive hypnotic therapy.
In the “I kid you not” department, last week an article was posted, I believe at WUWT, about a prediction of more drought conditions in Africa. The article ended with the bold prediction that there would be dryer than normal conditions in the years to come, but it was also likely that there would be wetter than normal years mixed in. All caused by AGW of course.