And we are supposed to believe in science without question; we are supposed to lay our lives into the hands of almighty science when it can’t even predict the weather within any sort of useful probability?

Nor can it cure cancer, which in today’s world of highly complicated scientific awareness seems like a rather simple biological mechanism.

Nor can it combat some of the simplest micro-organisms that attack the human body (or so they say). What else can’t science do? And what else has it not yet figured out? Do you have all day (or all week) to hear it? I don’t.

Back to the weather.

When I was 10, I was fascinated with the weather. The year before, my family had moved back to the States after living in Puerto Rico for four years. The weather on that tropical island was rather boring, so I was excited to live somewhere with a varied weather profile.

I got so excited to see snow after four years of deprivation, I could not see straight. I followed the weather forecast with the same intensity that Daddy Warbucks followed the stock market charts. I soon found out, though, that the most reliable way to “predict” the weather was to announce it while it was actually happening. I know that isn’t “predicting,” but at least it was somewhat accurate.

Today, after 60 years of technological advances, they still can’t predict the weather with any sort of reliable accuracy. In fact, I think it is worse than it was in the ‘60s. I think they rely too much on their technology, their algorithms and their faster-than-lightning computer processing. If all that technology and scientific hoopla says it is going to rain, then by gum, it is going to rain, even if it doesn’t.

This morning I woke up to a forecast of no rain, and it was raining. It is funny that once it happens, they adjust the forecast. Last night, hours before the downpour, it said “zero chance of precipitation.” This morning, while it is raining, it said “95% chance of rain” (not sure what the 5% holdout means, maybe just hedging their bet). It sounds like the weather service has come to the same conclusion I came to when I was 10—it is more accurate to “call the weather” when it is happening.

When I was in High School (also several hundred years ago), I read a book on Chaos Theory. It was probably one of the first books on the topic, as it was all the rage in scientific circles. (You can now see what a nerd I was. Being unpopular and unattractive when you are 17 has its advantages.)

The development of Chaos Theory is attributed to Edward Lorenz, who discovered its principles while working on weather prediction in 1961. Figures. This book opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I do often wonder why meteorology continued to be a scientific endeavour after Dr. Lorenz let the cat out of the bag, basically saying the weather is impossible to predict (as it always would be). He’s the same guy who came up with the Butterfly Effect, suggesting that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could affect the weather in Des Moines. (As all good scientists should know, did they conduct experiments on this theory?)

With my eyes now opened, I turned to the Farmer’s Almanac for my weather predicting needs, and I believe I was more successful determining what was going on meteorologically than following the National Weather Service.

Is this just another science bashing article? No, I don’t think so, although I do seem to have had a run on dissing science these past couple of months. It isn’t science I have a beef with, it is our infatuation with it—and our reliance on it. And with that infatuation comes a dismissal for any other “assessment of nature”—like common sense, intuition, and in the case of predicting the weather, woolly caterpillars and trick knees.

I also wonder how much “informed common sense and intuition” is lost due to this 100% reliance on technology to tell us things about nature. I wasn’t kidding when I said, “If the computers say it is going to rain, then good golly it’s going to frigging rain!”

Of course, I have no evidence that any meteorologist ever said this, but I wonder how many people count on weather reports to the degree that if what they predict doesn’t transpire, they don’t really notice. “The weather forecast said it was going to rain today, so we cancelled our picnic,” your friend replies. “Did it rain?” You say, “I don’t know, did it?”

Back in the day, the mid ‘60s when I was going through my “weather phase,” I wondered if the science gods given the task to predict the atmospheric performance coming up the next day, or the next week, actually looked at charts, patterns, temperatures, barometric pressures, cloud formations, and then “drew a conclusion” based on objective information, but the conclusions were more subjective through human analysis.

Much like doctors used to do in determining a treatment plan for their patients. No computer “told” them what to do. No computer “predicted” the weather. Humans did. Yes, humans with scientific knowledge which made them more likely to predict correctly. But humans nonetheless.

This is an important consideration. Using technology to help process information is not a bad thing as long as it is only “helping.” The decision, or conclusion, is still drawn by a human being, who looks at the information that technology has provided, and comes up with his or her conclusions. I wonder if this is gone now, or at least slipping away.

Of course, then we have the woolly caterpillars. There is science behind that way of predicting the weather as well. I am not sure how the Farmers Almanac comes up with their predictions, but again, they are probably more nature-based than computer-based.

I do have to say I am a bit surprised weather prediction is not the easiest scientific process out there today, considering much of the weather is man-made anyway. So, you would think it would be as easy to tell us what is going to happen atmospherically as it would be to tell us what we will be eating tomorrow if the cook has a recipe he or she is following. “We think we will whip up a nice snowstorm for you folks tomorrow! How about that?!” Of course, weather engineering is probably saved for remarkably important events, such as burning down millions of acres of timber, or flooding out vast numbers of human domiciles, rendering their residents homeless. We wouldn’t want to waste valuable and expensive resources on creating good weather for Jimmy’s little league baseball game. No way.

And of course, these important events that require weather manipulation are not something they would want to predict—to let everyone know their capabilities. Besides, that would spoil the surprise element to it all, which is pretty important, I would think.

So, don’t tell me how great science is until it can take care of some of these genuinely simple things—like predicting the weather, curing cancer, or fixing it so that dogs live to be 80. Let science fix some of the surely important things first. Then, and only then, I may start seeing it as wonderful as everyone now seems to think it is.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/05/25/predicting-the-weather