It would be fair to say that Klaus Weickman knows as much about the science of weather as anyone on the planet.
Not long ago, Klaus was working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s crack team of long-range weather modelers when a Nosy Parker with a pen asked him in October to describe what the weather would be like in January. In predictable scientific fashion, he began by describing his process.
NOAA collects detailed information around the clock from satellites, buoys, advanced radar imaging systems and atmospheric testing stations around the planet. Klaus and his colleagues digest all that data and feed it into sophisticated computers, which formulate predictive models projecting the weather six months, a year, five years hence. Then they pick a day that’s already happened, last Wednesday maybe, and apply the model retroactively to see if it correctly predicts weather that’s already happened. Nosy Parker was impressed, and wanted to know how often the models get it right.
“Remember when eggs were the Great Satan of the American diet? ”
“We’ve never gotten it right,” said Klaus, with admirable candor. “We come close sometimes, but we’ve never made a model capable of accurate long-range forecasting.”
Nosy Parker was disappointed, but sympathetic. How, he asked, do you account for that failure?
“Obviously,” said Klaus, “there’s a factor, or factors, that we’re not considering.”
A refreshingly frank response from someone who’s spent his entire career missing the mark, and a succinctly honest summary of the limitations of research science. Too often, “We believe science is real” means “Obey the latest MIT press release without question.” And that would be a mistake, because, too often, MIT, CDC, NREL and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are mistaken. Sometimes spectacularly.
It’s not that Klaus doesn’t know his business. In his field, he’s the best there is. The problem, if we want to call it that, is the way research science works. Practical science is easy(-er). Methods for building televisions, computers and satellites are well known and proven. Processes and materials may change, but the basic parameters are clearly marked.
Research scientists, by contrast, work without a net. They’re exploring in areas where little—sometimes very little—is known. In practice, research scientists base their theories on available data, then go looking for more data. As new studies produce new information, their conclusions invariably change, often radically. It can take a very long time, if ever, for a hypothesis to gain acceptance as “settled science.” Researchers have been chasing the most abundant substance in the universe, dark matter, for almost a hundred years and still couldn’t pick it out of a police lineup.
And “settled science” is rarely as settled as advertised. Expanding on equations dating back to Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton still had to bolt the door and close the drapes while developing modern calculus just to shut out the unscholarly jeers of prominent 18th century colleagues who mocked infinitesimals as “the ghosts of departed quantities.” Newton got the last snicker, obviously.
Basing his theories on the proposition that you can only till a field for so long before your plow runs into the side of the barn, 19th century egghead Thomas Malthus was not the first to foresee global starvation due to overpopulation, just the first to predict it scientifically. What Malthus and a small army of present-day population alarmists fail to take into consideration is humanity’s natural genius for expanding food production at a rate faster than people production.
“What’s important is that we stay mindful of the difference between proven science and the speculative kind… ”
For pretty much all of history, scientists have adhered to the tabula rasa model of human development. Also known as the “blank slate” theory, it says that humans are born without inherent mental content, and that all knowledge and behavior comes from experience and environment. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a host of studies began revealing the profound and remarkably specific influence genetics have on individual nature.
Physicists around the world were flabbergasted in 2011 when scientists at the CERN super collider in Switzerland announced that subatomic particles called neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. It was subsequently discovered that a loose electrical cable had knocked the experiment’s clocks slightly out of sync.
Many scientists profess puzzlement that the promised explosion of alpine biodiversity that was supposed to attend Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program is simply not happening, nor showing any sign that it might. Remember when eggs were the Great Satan of the American diet? And, of course, the science surrounding COVID-19 proved to be wrong on every front, and largely remains wrong. These examples aren’t the exceptions, they’re the rule.
Research scientists are not immune to professional pride and natural enthusiasm, and they can be forgiven for occasionally overselling their findings. More often than not, though, the media are the principle hucksters behind dubious scientific discoveries. The ice age scare of the 1970s was a fringe theory that left most climatologists cold, but it caught fire in the press and cast a temporary chill over public hopes for the future.
Nobody is suggesting that research science isn’t useful and necessary. The amazing health, comfort and abundance we know today are all products of research science, and we’ll have research scientists to thank for the even better world that’s sure to come.
And just for the record, even people who don’t have yard signs believe in science. Virtually everyone believes in it because, from the light on their front porch to the smartphone in their hand, they’re surrounded by it all day, every day. Nobody doesn’t believe in their TV. But not all science is ready for market, and research scientists have to be wrong, usually a lot, before they can be right. “I have not failed,” Thomas Edison famously said. “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
What’s important is that we stay mindful of the difference between proven science and the speculative kind, and that we don’t make permanent decisions based on research-in-progress. Berkeley’s scholarly paper on increasing irritability among unpaid lab assistants is cause for neither rejoicing nor despondency, but simply a 258-page assurance that the relentless search for truth continues at its own majestic, glacial pace. So, no, you don’t have to stop eating street tacos just because Johns Hopkins proposed a link between cilantro and piles.
