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.
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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?
Keep in mind that Atlantic hurricane season has just started, as well as the western wildfire season. The already understaffed NWS and NOAA offices are now running on skeleton crews, just at the point when skilled forecasters are needed the most. My intuition is you ain't seen nothin' yet.
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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