Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Back in 2006, some people in Hong Kong noticed that despite its facing out over the warm waters of the South China Sea, it seldom gets hit by typhoons. In fact, sometimes the typhoons seem to go out of their way to avoid hitting Hong Kong. For example, here's the path of Typhoon Lionrock in 2010:
[Image is in the Public Domain]
If you don't know your Asian geography, Hong Kong is basically right in the middle of the loop of the question mark.
There's at least a tentative scientific explanation for this; cyclones of all sorts are moved by upper atmosphere steering currents, which are created -- like all winds -- by air pressure gradients. There is a stable-ish high pressure zone near Hong Kong, and that causes an outflow of air that acts like a repulsive force on any storms heading that way. It's not permanent; like all air masses, it moves. Hong Kong has experienced typhoons, just fewer than you might expect based on its location.
But when the pattern was noticed, a business tycoon named Li Ka-Sheng started telling everyone that he had created a repellent force field, and that was keeping Hong Kong safe. Because, after all, if there's a major typhoon it would cause businesses to close, and we can't have that. Everyone still talks about "Li's field," and it comes up every year during typhoon season. "Well, it's typhoon season again," people in Hong Kong will say. "At least we have Li's field protecting us."
Here's the thing, though. Li, and just about everyone who talks about Li's field, are joking. It's satire, and everyone knew it right from the get-go.
Over here in the United States, though, we're hearing something similar, and the sad thing is I don't think the people making the claim are trying to be funny.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, taking a break from her usual jobs of killing dogs and doing Border Patrol cosplay, attended a cabinet meeting in which the topic of this year's hurricane season came up. Despite there being thirteen named storms, four of which reached category 4, none of them hit the continental United States. (The last time this happened was 2015.) And guess who got praised for this?
"Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane," Noem gushed. "Even you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that."
What is astonishing about this is that no one laughed. I still maintain that the Trump presidency will end the moment an entire room bursts out laughing at something one of his sycophantic toadies -- or better yet, the Head Toad himself -- says. Trump has no problem with arguing; he loves a fight. But he can't handle being humiliated. (Which is why the constant trolling from Gavin Newsom gets under his skin.)
But amazingly, a piece of flattery so fulsome it would have embarrassed Kim Jong-Un was delivered without so much as a chuckle from anyone. And Trump? He eats that stuff up. There is no compliment so ridiculous, so over-the-top, that he won't give one of his smarmy smiles and say, "Yes, that's meeeeee."
It's why nearly everyone was cringing -- except for Trump -- when he was awarded the "FIFA Peace Prize" by FIFA president Gianni Infantino last week. Infantino burbled on about how Trump had "taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and by doing so have united people across the world," so he was being awarded a "beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go." Most people realized immediately that the whole thing happened so that Trump will continue to support the United States's (partial) hosting of the 2026 World Cup -- and to soothe his hurt feelings over the Nobel Committee passing over him for this year's Peace Prize, which went instead to a Venezuelan activist.
And just about everybody -- again, except for Trump -- found the whole spectacle about as cringey as anything in recent memory. Isn't it the Republicans who are always screeching about the "everyone gets a trophy" approach in education? And here we have what amounts to, "I know, you have the big sads that you didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize. Look, here's a special Peace Prize we made up just for you."
Word is, Saturday Night Live didn't spoof this because there was nothing they could do that was more wince-inducing than the video footage of the real event.
Me, I can't wait to hear who wins the FIFA Prize in Physics.
Oh, and not to be outdone, Fox "News" commentator Jesse Watters thinks Trump's FIFA Prize is just ducky. "It's almost like God gave us COVID to kick Trump out so he could emerge again, and oversee this wonderful four years of birthday parties, international sporting events, and octagon," Watters said, the last-mentioned being an apparent reference to a suggestion to build a UFC octagon on the White House lawn. "If you doubted there is a God -- this is evidence there is a God."
No, he wasn't joking, either.
I mean, I can laugh about this, but it's honestly frightening that we have what amounts to a coddled, spoiled toddler at the helm of the entire country. And like many spoiled toddlers, he has a broad vindictive streak; cross him, and he will do everything in his power to destroy you. And so far, there aren't enough people in either Congress or the Supreme Court who have the backbone to put him in Time Out.
This last bit is why I am absolutely sick unto death of the taglines you see on many left-leaning social media posts. (Occupy Democrats is a good example, and one of the worst offenders.) You know the trope: "This new shocking revelation will destroy Trump" or "MAGA in disarray because..." or "GOP crumbling after announcement that..." While these probably serve their dual purpose of (1) bolstering the spirits of beleaguered liberals and (2) getting people to click the link, they're profoundly misleading. Thus far, nothing has taken away the carte blanche given to Trump by the ruling party. All the chaos, the spiking prices and slowing economy and disastrous foreign policy and human rights violations, and even the credible claims of rape and pedophilia, have really caused very little damage. Sure, his poll numbers have dropped, but by and large the party is still loyal to him. Scarier still, the Supreme Court steadfastly refuses to put the brakes on. The media, too, is for the most part still kissing his ass at every opportunity. The small fractures -- court cases not going his way, and the loss of people like Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and (bafflingly) Marjorie Taylor Greene -- have been just that: small. Some people are saying these represent the first signs of an impending revolt, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Hopefully, though -- at least for those of us on the left -- history has shown that when these kinds of collapses happen, they can happen suddenly. Both the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero got away with excesses of the most bizarre and brutal kind, until finally the branch snapped and they were overthrown. (Caligula was murdered and Nero committed suicide to avoid his cousin's fate.) It may seem like a poor comparison -- and admittedly, I'm not a historian -- but to my eye, the lavish flattery of his followers, up to and including attributions that are somewhere in the realm of magic, and the awarding of meaningless prizes just to keep Dear Leader in a good mood, have their precedents.
Which should worry not only Trump himself, but the people who are enabling him.
In any case, that's the latest from the political circus here in the United States. The head of FIFA awards a man who is turning his American Gestapo against our own citizens, is threatening war in Venezuela, and wants to annex Greenland and Canada a "Peace Prize," and a member of the Cabinet apparently believes that this same man can create a repulsive force to ward off hurricanes.
Well, I'll agree with her this far: he's repulsive. But I don't think that's what she meant.
Something that really grinds my gears is how quick people can be to trumpet their own ignorance, seemingly with pride.
I recall being in a school board budget meeting some years ago, and the science department line items were being discussed. One of the proposed equipment purchases that came up was an electronic weather station for the Earth Science classroom. And a local attending the meeting said, loud enough for all to hear, "Why the hell do they need a weather station? If I want to know what the weather is, I stick my head out the window! Hurr hurr hurr hurr durr!"
Several of his friends joined in the laughter, while I -- and the rest of the science faculty in attendance -- sat there quietly attempting to bring our blood pressures back down to non-lethal levels.
What astonishes me about this idiotic comment is two things: (1) my aforementioned bafflement about why he was so quick to demonstrate to everyone at the meeting that he was ignorant; and (2) what it said about his own level of curiosity. When I don't know something, my first thought is not to ridicule but to ask questions. If I thought an electronic weather station might be an odd or a frivolous purchase, I would have asked what exactly the thing did, and how it was better than "sticking my head out the window." The Earth Science teacher -- who was in attendance that evening -- could then have explained it to me.
And afterward, miracle of miracles, I might have learned something.
All sciences are to some extent prone to this "I'm ignorant and I'm proud of it" attitude by laypeople, but meteorology may be the worst. How many times have you heard people say things like, "A fifty percent chance of rain? How many jobs can you think of where you could get as good results by flipping a coin, and still get paid?" It took me a fifteen-second Google search to find the weather.gov page explaining that the "probability of precipitation" percentages mean something a great deal more specific than the forecasters throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Might happen, might not." A fifty-percent chance of rain means that in the forecast area, any given point has a fifty percent chance of receiving at least 0.01" of rain; from this it's obvious that if there's a fifty percent chance over a large geographical area, the likelihood of someone receiving rain in the region is much greater than fifty percent. (These middling percentages are far more common in the northern hemisphere's summer, when much of the rain falls in the form of sporadic local thunderstorms that are extremely hard to predict precisely. If you live in the US Midwest or anywhere in the eastern half of North America, you can probably remember times when you got rain and your friends five miles away didn't, or vice versa.)
The problem is, meteorology is complex. Computer models of the atmosphere rely on estimates of conditions (barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, air speed both vertically and horizontally, and particulate content, to name a few) along with mathematical equations describing how those quantities vary over time and influence each other. The results are never completely accurate, and extending forward in time -- long-range forecasting -- is still nearly impossible except in the broadest-brush sense. Add to that the fact there are weather phenomena that are still largely unexplained; one of the weirdest is the Catatumbo lightning, which occurs near where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. That one small region gets significant lightning 140 to 160 days a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from sixteen to forty times per minute. The area sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 strikes per square kilometer -- and no one knows why.
Despite the inaccuracies and the gaps in our understanding, we are far ahead of the idiotic "they're just flipping a coin" that the non-science types would have you believe. The deadliest North American hurricane on record, the 1900 Galveston storm that took an estimated eight thousand lives, was as devastating as it was precisely because back then, forecasting was so rudimentary that almost no one knew it was coming. Today we usually have days, sometimes weeks, of warning before major weather events -- and yet, if the prediction is off by a few hours or landfall is inaccurate by ten miles, people still complain that "the meteorologists are just making guesses."
What's grimly ironic is that we might get our chance to find out what it's like to go back to a United States where we actually don't have accurate weather forecasting, because Trump and his cronies have cut the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the bone. The motivation was, I suspect, largely because of the Right's pro-fossil-fuels, anti-climate-change bias, but the result will be to hobble our ability to make precise forecasts and get people out of harm's way. You think the central Texas floods in the first week of July were bad?
Oh, and don't ask FEMA to help you after the disaster hits. That's been cut, too. Following the Texas floods, thousands of calls from survivors to FEMA were never returned, because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was too busy cosplaying at Alligator Auschwitz to bother doing anything about the situation. (She responded to criticism by stating that FEMA "responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently," following the Trump approach that all you have to do is lie egregiously and it automatically becomes true.)
Ignorance is nothing to be embarrassed about, but it's also nothing to be proud of. And when people's ignorance impels them to elect ignorant ideologues as leaders, the whole thing becomes downright dangerous. Learn some science yourself, sure; the whole fifteen-year run of Skeptophilia could probably be summed up in that sentence.
But more than that -- demand that our leaders base their decisions on facts, logic, science, and evidence, not ideology, bias, and who happens to have dumped the most money into the election campaign. We're standing on a precipice right now, and we can't afford to be silent.
Otherwise I'm very much afraid we'll find out all too quickly which way the wind is blowing.
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