I hope you know enough not to read your daily horoscope in expectation that its predictions will become realities. Surely you realize the general nature of the predictions.
Here’s mine for today, August 26: “The Gemini quarter moon rises this morning, dearest Aries, intensifying thoughts, schedules, and workloads. Stay organized and keep to important tasks in order to rise above any stress that builds around you. Luckily, the Nodes of Fate step in to strengthen your resolve, especially when you focus on personal goals and cultivating meaningful relationships. Important conversations can also galvanize you to pursue a future with someone special. Romantic surprises continue into the evening when Venus and Uranus share a sweet connection. This energy is perfect for showing you care with sentimental gestures, no matter how simple or extravagant they may be.’
That’s the horoscope for someone labeled an Aries. But what does it say that isn’t common sense or wishful thinking? Take that last prediction about “romantic surprises.” Does it apply to a hermit monk? To Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia during the evening’s Vesper prayers? And what of the advice to “stay organized”? Would anyone listen to advice to stay disorganized?
Horoscopes are like ten-day weather forecasts. They aren’t very often accurate. In fact, they are dependent on some generalization of weather patterns usually associated with geography and the seasons. I can predict ten days of hot weather for Phoenix-Scottsdale in summer—every summer—and be praised for my accuracy. I can predict ten days of highly variable weather for Yellowstone National Park. Both predictions are more commonsense than science; both more dependent upon experience and knowledge than on models supported by their algorithms.
Sure of the present but doubtful of the future, we humans want some specifics about what lies ahead. Knowing breeds a sense, however false, of security.
But making predictions can also be a control on thinking and behavior. And no predictions are more designed to control both than those promulgated by the IPCC. Its “climate” predictions have generated widespread changes in energy use, regulations on lifestyles, and mandated commerce, such as in pushing electric cars on a public reluctant to buy them. One product of the IPCC’s predictions is fear about the future, a fear that has a forceful influence on the least experienced among us, that is, the young.
Those who have lived through decades of IPCC predictions can weigh them against horoscope predictions that have remained unfulfilled during adult lifetimes. The IPCC is the world’s astrologer. Yearly, it makes its predictions, and yearly, it says nothing about its past predictions that did not materialize. Yet, the gullible like Congresswoman Alexandria-Cortez seem unable to question the IPCC on its past failures.
The IPCC Predictions
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be a great place to work. The people who work there have jobs as secure as the local TV weather forecaster. A fifty percent accuracy is all one needs to maintain the job. Make an inaccurate prediction? Nothing happens. One can always say, “Some surprisingly strong storms popped up unexpectedly as the winds shifted. Some people lost their power as trees fell on power lines northwest of the city.” Or, “The additional two inches of snow fell unexpectedly, making roads slippery.”
Who is going to lose his or her job? By the time one acknowledges the unexpected weather, the new prediction is in progress. “Yesterday, we had those unexpected storms. But the weather for today and tomorrow should be calmer.” No accountability. NO, “I failed miserably, and I am profoundly sorry.” NO “We at station xyz have decided to forego weather segments other than to say what just happened, what is happening now, and what we hypothesize will occur over the next two hours.”
And there’s no accountability in the IPCC, just as there is no accountability in government agencies and in Congress—the Congress that passed the bills requiring expenditures of billions of dollars for climate change that will do nothing quantifiable to change—or preserve—climate. Take the billions allocated for charging stations that produced fewer than 10 EV charging stations. Who’s accountable?
And all those unfulfilled predictions of the IPCC? The organization keeps making more just like like the local TV weather forecaster, unperturbed by past failures, hyperbole, assumptions, and pseudoscience that has relied on extrapolations of data from “ghost stations.”
In 2001, an IPCC “working group” released its predictions that included decreased crop production. What many climate alarmists seem to have missed in the report is a paragraph in section 4.2 “Agriculture and Food Security.” That paragraph reads:
Confidence in specific numerical estimates of climate change impacts on production, income, and prices obtained from large, aggregated, integrated assessment models is considered to be low because there are several remaining uncertainties. The models are highly sensitive to some parameters that have been subjected to sensitivity analysis, yet sensitivity to a large number of other parameters has not been reported. Other uncertainties include the magnitude and persistence of effects of rising atmospheric CO2 on crop yield under realistic farming conditions; potential changes in crop and animal pest loses; spatial variability in crop responses to climate change; and the effects of changes in climate variability and extreme events on crops and livestock.*
In spite of those uncertainties, the IPCC made a prediction for lower crop yields. Yet, if you read through USDA reports on food production, you’ll find that many crops increased over the ensuing two decades—in spite of weather events controlled by cycles of El Niño and La Niña that bring excessive rainfall and excessive droughts during their years of influence.
Nevertheless, the alarmists have convinced the politicians to spend inordinate amounts of money that will do nothing to alter Earth’s getting warmer or cooler. Sections of continents will undergo droughts and excessive rainfall as they have undergone them through both historical and prehistorical times. Note the Central American drought that devastated the Mayan culture, the droughty decades that affected the Anasazi (Pueblo-Hopi), and the southeastern decades-long drought in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that impacted the Native Americans who met—and maybe killed— those English pioneers of Jamestown’s “Lost Colony.”
You Americans Just Spent Billions for Unbuilt Charging Stations
Horoscope writers, TV weather forecasters, IPCC “scientists,” government agents, and politicians are never held accountable for their misinformation and, in the instance of government, wasteful spending. Just as sure as you can be that tomorrow’s newspaper will have a horoscope column, that the local TV station will have a weather forecast, that no government official will apologize for mishandling taxes on incomplete projects, so you can be sure that the IPCC will have a new prediction for the next ten years. And every year after that, it will issue more predictions with no apology for past failures. You can be sure, also, that the alarmists will keep sounding the alarm that “we have just a few years left” before climate obliterates life on the planet.
*IPCC. 2001. Online at https://pdf.live/edit?url=https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/wg2ts-1.pdf&guid=c206d88d-a584-6193-182a-e14e14386811&installDate=042524&source=google-d_pdftab_crx See section 4.3.
Here’s mine for today, August 26: “The Gemini quarter moon rises this morning, dearest Aries, intensifying thoughts, schedules, and workloads. Stay organized and keep to important tasks in order to rise above any stress that builds around you. Luckily, the Nodes of Fate step in to strengthen your resolve, especially when you focus on personal goals and cultivating meaningful relationships. Important conversations can also galvanize you to pursue a future with someone special. Romantic surprises continue into the evening when Venus and Uranus share a sweet connection. This energy is perfect for showing you care with sentimental gestures, no matter how simple or extravagant they may be.’
That’s the horoscope for someone labeled an Aries. But what does it say that isn’t common sense or wishful thinking? Take that last prediction about “romantic surprises.” Does it apply to a hermit monk? To Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia during the evening’s Vesper prayers? And what of the advice to “stay organized”? Would anyone listen to advice to stay disorganized?
Horoscopes are like ten-day weather forecasts. They aren’t very often accurate. In fact, they are dependent on some generalization of weather patterns usually associated with geography and the seasons. I can predict ten days of hot weather for Phoenix-Scottsdale in summer—every summer—and be praised for my accuracy. I can predict ten days of highly variable weather for Yellowstone National Park. Both predictions are more commonsense than science; both more dependent upon experience and knowledge than on models supported by their algorithms.
Sure of the present but doubtful of the future, we humans want some specifics about what lies ahead. Knowing breeds a sense, however false, of security.
But making predictions can also be a control on thinking and behavior. And no predictions are more designed to control both than those promulgated by the IPCC. Its “climate” predictions have generated widespread changes in energy use, regulations on lifestyles, and mandated commerce, such as in pushing electric cars on a public reluctant to buy them. One product of the IPCC’s predictions is fear about the future, a fear that has a forceful influence on the least experienced among us, that is, the young.
Those who have lived through decades of IPCC predictions can weigh them against horoscope predictions that have remained unfulfilled during adult lifetimes. The IPCC is the world’s astrologer. Yearly, it makes its predictions, and yearly, it says nothing about its past predictions that did not materialize. Yet, the gullible like Congresswoman Alexandria-Cortez seem unable to question the IPCC on its past failures.
The IPCC Predictions
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be a great place to work. The people who work there have jobs as secure as the local TV weather forecaster. A fifty percent accuracy is all one needs to maintain the job. Make an inaccurate prediction? Nothing happens. One can always say, “Some surprisingly strong storms popped up unexpectedly as the winds shifted. Some people lost their power as trees fell on power lines northwest of the city.” Or, “The additional two inches of snow fell unexpectedly, making roads slippery.”
Who is going to lose his or her job? By the time one acknowledges the unexpected weather, the new prediction is in progress. “Yesterday, we had those unexpected storms. But the weather for today and tomorrow should be calmer.” No accountability. NO, “I failed miserably, and I am profoundly sorry.” NO “We at station xyz have decided to forego weather segments other than to say what just happened, what is happening now, and what we hypothesize will occur over the next two hours.”
And there’s no accountability in the IPCC, just as there is no accountability in government agencies and in Congress—the Congress that passed the bills requiring expenditures of billions of dollars for climate change that will do nothing quantifiable to change—or preserve—climate. Take the billions allocated for charging stations that produced fewer than 10 EV charging stations. Who’s accountable?
And all those unfulfilled predictions of the IPCC? The organization keeps making more just like like the local TV weather forecaster, unperturbed by past failures, hyperbole, assumptions, and pseudoscience that has relied on extrapolations of data from “ghost stations.”
In 2001, an IPCC “working group” released its predictions that included decreased crop production. What many climate alarmists seem to have missed in the report is a paragraph in section 4.2 “Agriculture and Food Security.” That paragraph reads:
Confidence in specific numerical estimates of climate change impacts on production, income, and prices obtained from large, aggregated, integrated assessment models is considered to be low because there are several remaining uncertainties. The models are highly sensitive to some parameters that have been subjected to sensitivity analysis, yet sensitivity to a large number of other parameters has not been reported. Other uncertainties include the magnitude and persistence of effects of rising atmospheric CO2 on crop yield under realistic farming conditions; potential changes in crop and animal pest loses; spatial variability in crop responses to climate change; and the effects of changes in climate variability and extreme events on crops and livestock.*
In spite of those uncertainties, the IPCC made a prediction for lower crop yields. Yet, if you read through USDA reports on food production, you’ll find that many crops increased over the ensuing two decades—in spite of weather events controlled by cycles of El Niño and La Niña that bring excessive rainfall and excessive droughts during their years of influence.
Nevertheless, the alarmists have convinced the politicians to spend inordinate amounts of money that will do nothing to alter Earth’s getting warmer or cooler. Sections of continents will undergo droughts and excessive rainfall as they have undergone them through both historical and prehistorical times. Note the Central American drought that devastated the Mayan culture, the droughty decades that affected the Anasazi (Pueblo-Hopi), and the southeastern decades-long drought in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that impacted the Native Americans who met—and maybe killed— those English pioneers of Jamestown’s “Lost Colony.”
You Americans Just Spent Billions for Unbuilt Charging Stations
Horoscope writers, TV weather forecasters, IPCC “scientists,” government agents, and politicians are never held accountable for their misinformation and, in the instance of government, wasteful spending. Just as sure as you can be that tomorrow’s newspaper will have a horoscope column, that the local TV station will have a weather forecast, that no government official will apologize for mishandling taxes on incomplete projects, so you can be sure that the IPCC will have a new prediction for the next ten years. And every year after that, it will issue more predictions with no apology for past failures. You can be sure, also, that the alarmists will keep sounding the alarm that “we have just a few years left” before climate obliterates life on the planet.
*IPCC. 2001. Online at https://pdf.live/edit?url=https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/wg2ts-1.pdf&guid=c206d88d-a584-6193-182a-e14e14386811&installDate=042524&source=google-d_pdftab_crx See section 4.3.
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