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Monday, April 27, 2020

Forecasters are In great demand, but predictions have never been more wrong !

Over the years 
we have heard many  
scary forecasts, 
about many things,
from Y2K, to CO2,
to COVID-19.

We must 
love hearing 
scary predictions 
of the future, 
especially
worst-case 
predictions !

"Experts" compete
for media attention.

Predictions get 
lots of attention.

Especially the 
forecasters who
"shout the loudest".

A scary prediction 
gets lots of attention.

Any prediction
that can be directly,
or indirectly used, 
to criticize President
Trump, is favored
by most mainstream
media sources, 

The prediction doesn't 
even have to come true, 
because the media 
will never look back 
and report that it
did not come true.



More attention 
is earned with a
negative prediction.

I've been observing 
negative predictions
about climate science
since 1997
( they're actually junk 
science, because the
predictions never 
come true ) .

The worst prediction
so far, started in 2018:
  We were 
told the world, 
as we know it,
is going to end
in 12 years, merely
from a continuation 
of climate change,
according to two 
well known climate 
'perfessers': 
The most famous 
high school dropou
in the world, Sweden's 
     Greta 
"thundering" 
  Thunberg, 
        and
our very own
  Alexandria 
  Occasionally 
  Coherent ! 



Three problems
that make people 
too susceptible
to scary, negative 
predictions:

(1) 
People too often 
believe the future 
can be predicted.

Consider United States
Recession Predictions:
  U.S. economists
know recessions
are very difficult
to predict, so they
never predict one !

Even knowing 
that at least
one recession
per decade 
is likely, U.S. 
economists,
as a group,
have NEVER, 
predicted a 
U.S. recession !



(2)
People want to 
believe specific 
predictions that fit
their pre-existing 
beliefs, which is 
called confirmation 
bias.



(3)
The mass media
loves to publish
the most negative 
predictions,
often presented
with even scarier 
headlines.

They get attention
and page views.

Reporters almost 
always fail to ask:
"How do you know that?" .

They almost never 
look back at 
prior predictions 
that were wrong
 ( nearly all of them !  )
... unless it was
President Trump 
who made 
the prediction, 
and it was wrong !



In 1987, 
the Thatcher 
UK government sent 
a leaflet to 23 million 
households in the country, 
proclaiming that 
‘any man or woman 
can get the AIDS virus'.

One third of the leaflets 
went to homes with one 
or more householders 
aged over 60, not likely 
to get AIDS, along with 
all the women.



In 1988, 
the Thatcher 
UK government
expressed great 
fear about 
'a global heat trap 
which could lead to 
climatic instability’.

32 years later 
it is a little warmer,
mainly at high 
(cold) latitudes,
mainly in the coldest
six months of the year,
and mainly at night.

That's good news !



The U.S. CIA had 
issued new alarms 
about Soviet Union
power almost until 
the very moment 
the Berlin Wall 
came down.



Forecasts that 
the year 2000 (Y2K) 
would upset 
the world’s computers, 
turned out to be 
grossly overstated. 



In 2001.
U.S. Intelligence 
did not predict more
al-Qaeda attacks
on the World Trade
Center, knowing 
they first tried, and 
failed, to collapse 
a NYC World Trade 
Center building in 1993. 



In 2003, 
New Zealand 
prime minister 
Helen Clark, 
talking about 
coronavirus 
SARS-1, 
said that some 
World Health 
Organization officials 
feared it could be 
as deadly as the flu 
of 1918, that killed 
20 to 50 million people.



In 2004, 
a United Nations official 
said that bird flu could pose 
‘a far worse threat 
to humans than SARS-1’. 



In the mid-2000s, 
Lord Stern’s UK report 
on climate change (2006), 
and the IPCC’s fourth 
assessment (2007), 
made CO2 a scary 
'boogeyman',  that 
had to be stopped 
to save the planet !



Few economic 
forecasters 
saw the crash 
of 2008 coming,
and many of those
had always been 
negative about 
the economy, like 
a stropped clock.



UK health minister 
Andy Burnham 
warned in 2009 
that Britain could have 
‘over 100,000 cases 
a day’ of swine flu.



There have been 
repeated predictions
of doom, or at least
of very bad news,
on many different 
subjects.

The predictions are 
consistently wrong.

No matter how
confident the 
forecaster was.
at the time !

Even if 
he or she
had a PhD !

So why do most people
still take predictions
seriously ?