Forecasting Nonsense

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

Alternate Title – “The Limits of “Science.”  Second Alternate Title – “Politics Can Screw Up Anything.”  Someone else has finally noticed that Scientific American is trying really hard to be Politico.  I noticed it long ago and have commented on it since.  A great deal of the problem is, I think, epistemological, not scientific.  Well, that and the fact that some people are just scoundrels.

OK, used a big word in that introduction – let’s make sure we are all on the same page with it.  Epistemology is “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.”  Put more plainly, it is an effort to define what we know and how we know it.  In the effort we also discover what we do not and cannot know.  As Dirty Harry put it decades ago, “Man’s got to know his limitations.”  I wonder if we think we have any anymore.

I personally think mankind began to think human omniscience (another big word – it means, essentially, the ability to know everything) was possible when we split the atom.  When Oppenheimer saw the first nuclear explosion, he claimed to recall the words of a Hindu god revealing himself.  In other words, to some extent, Oppenheimer thought the explosion revealed mankind’s god-level capabilities.

The internet certainly creates a sense of omniscience as anyone with a phone in their hand has everything known at their fingertips – or so it is claimed.

Then I run across stuff like this and I see that not only do we think we are omniscience – we act like it.  I just linked to an article that examines various scenarios for future energy consumption and emissions for all mankind – the entire planet.  Now let’s think about that effort for just a moment.  It is about far more than just the science of how we make and use energy.  It’s about economics and human behavior and politics.  For example, nuclear energy has been persona non gratia for decades now despite the fact that it is a truly revolutionary source of energy.  It has only recently regained any traction because we have decided climate change is more hazardous than nuclear fall out.  That decision is not a mathematical consideration, it is one born of human fear, capturing the marketplace and politics.  There is no equation in the world that can capture such things.

Imagine how different the world might be if our early enthusiasm for nuclear energy had been sustained.  Would we even be thinking about climate change now?  Attempting to forecast the future in such a fashion is a fool’s errand.  But politicians are happy to pay for fool’s errands if they can capitalize on them for short-term political gain.  And so our tax dollars are sent on fool’s errands, and laws are passed in an effort to shape the marketplace, which history has proved will not be shaped.  Like a life spent wearing ill-fitting clothing – everything is just off somehow because we pretend to omniscience.

Isaiah, speaking with God’s voice, once wrote:

Let the wicked abandon his way,
And the unrighteous person his thoughts;
And let him return to the Lord,
And He will have compassion on him,
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Admittedly, I was in school a long time ago now.  But when I studied science one of the first things you learned was that when you discover something new, when you gain fresh knowledge, it reveals even more what you do not know.  Science, properly done, raises far more questions than it answers.  We don’t know everything – we can’t know everything.

The future is God’s alone to know.  We are not God.  It is time we remembered that.