Regarding electric vehicles being here to stay; many people I know are quite happy with their Teslas, so those EV's deserve to stay. What does not deserve to stay are mandates to force unwilling people to buy EV's by crippling ICE vehicles with draconian regulations. Here in the Great Plains, EV's simply do not have the range, pulling power or temperature flexibility to be universally practical. Who wants an EV pickup which can't pull his bass boat?
Dr. Pielke -- Did you grade your student this liberally? Half a point each on two election predictions to which your answers were totally wrong? ....because of your internal, unexpressed mental reasoning? tsk tsk.... :-)
Not a big predictor or forecaster of any event, but I doubt anyone could have predicted the terrible devastation of Hurricane Helene. STOP: Pray for the men, women and children of Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and surrounding areas. Imagine, if you can, not only losing your home with all its contents, but losing the very soil where your home stood. Imagine all your daily pathways being gone…the very earth your feet walked upon…gone.
That said, for all you Sooners, I correctly predicted the University of Oklahoma football team would not win the SEC.
No one could have predicted the near-miss assassination of Donald Trump. Not a prediction or forecast. It was, without a doubt, a true miracle!
In my opinion, no one can predict or forecast outcome of wars in the Middle East (Gaza, Israel, Iraq, Iran, etc.) because there will never be an end. They have been at war almost since beginning of time, why stop now?
Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, predictions or forecasts won’t matter to the hundreds of thousands who have lost their lives in this debacle, caused almost entirely by the Biden family and the Biden administration’s refusal to negotiate an end very early on. The blood of those thousands upon thousands is on the hands of the Biden family and the Biden administration. Do not doubt it.
I did not predict or forecast nor bet on the election of Donald Trump or republican majority in house and senate, but I prayed constantly that would be the outcome. God always answers our prayers. It’s not always the outcome for which we prayed. My prayers were answered in November..
Ramblings of an elderly great-grandmother who had five uncles who served in WWII. Two were taken prisoners of war, one taken at Bataan, prisoner till end of war. The other was at Pearl Harbor on that fateful Sunday, taken later in war, was on USS Missouri when surrender signed. MAGA
Hi Roger - have you expanded your universe of prediction research to include betting markets? For hurricane forecasts, and much else, betting markets might be superior (as they seem to be for elections and a growing number of others).
Going forward, please keep the Bundesliga. Keep the Premier League also as necessary. We need windows to the world and should work to promote the 2026 World Cup coming to America.
Sticking more closely to data, you could have fun predicting currency swings, average cost per kWh charged by utilities to customers, or change in emissions by country or region. You get a chance to analyze a few layers deep what policies have, and have not, been effective.
That's all the spit balling I have for you now. Thank you for your work and best wishes for an outstanding 2025!
I will pull for FC St. Pauli, except when they have a match with Werder Bremen, our family's hometown team. Just saw the green and white in person dominate FC Union Berlin 4-1. Union Berlin did set off some incredible (prohibited) pyrotechnics worth the delay.
Might I please suggest that a major purpose of forecasting is to provide raw material for discussion, leading us to the wisdom of Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, 1776. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Unlike you, I try not to do predictions or projections. This is because they are not typically calculated using data that can be replicated. They also tend to have a component of "belief" which does not mix with hard science.
Why not withdraw from prediction? That might give you more time to work with measured data, much preferred in science, on topics that you are currently doing really well.
I've decided that this stance (withdraw from prediction) is not possible.
Every decision that we make is predicated on a prediction of the consequences of action. A decision is thus a prediction. There are prediction-free actions (see: evolution), but in social systems the question is not predict or not, but how best to incorporate predictions into decisions.
Back in the day, when Dan Sarewitz and I led a big NSF project on prediction in the earth sciences we made up bumper stickers with the bottom line from our project
" EVs are here to stay ". Hmm. Possibly. Depends how much civil unrest governments are prepared to tolerate, as huge numbers of people see their freedom of mobility stolen from them. And see scarce electricity supplies diverted to EV charging ( in UK at least, where actual power stations are being closed in favour of Miliband's fantasy of renewables ) And other people see the value of their ' investment ' drop like a stone as second hand values of EVs plummet, when potential purchasers become aware of the likely need for hugely expensive replacement batteries. And perhaps even politicians will realise that a ' solution ' that can take 70,000 miles to achieve carbon parity with a proper car, at which point the prospect of battery replacement hoves into view and the massive CO2 emissions cycle starts again, isn't a solution at all. And let's not mention the Felicity Ace, or Gatwick airport carpark fires.
So yes, EVs are here to stay. As a status symbol for rich, virtue-signalling socialists / Democrats, and, here at least, in the form of the traditional battery-powered milk float. As a viable system of mass mobility or industrial transport? Probably not.
I'd guess that the many millions/billions of Tuk Tuks and lots of other practical utility vehicles go EV. So much cleaner (particulates) and simpler (less repairs). As tech advances so will usage IMO.
When it comes to having the integrity to review and evaluate your previous predictions, you score 100%.. Let's see if Sable the Soothsayer does that.
Re: Russia’s war on Ukraine will be:
I would suggest that option "d) Escalated (e.g., perhaps involving NATO or nuclear weapons)" was rather poorly worded.
First, a number of analysts have argued that NATO involvement in Ukraine already exists on a number of levels dating back to George W Bush's Bucharest Memorandum in 2008 declaring that Ukraine and Georgia will become part of NATO which set of a firestorm in Moscow causing US Ambassador Bill Burns to issue his famous "Nyet means Nyet" response to the Bush administration. Since at least 2014 NATO countries have been training Ukrainian troops to NATO Standards. NATO involvement is not a response to the war, but the major cause of it.
Secondly, while nuclear weapons haven't been used (fortunately!), Russia has raised its nuclear doctrine, which in effect does escalate things. It's use of their hypersonic missile may also be considered a form of escalation. They now have a battlefield demonstration of weapon for which there is no known defence, and even if not nuclear tipped, can carry a warhead that can do almost as much damage as a tactical nuke.
Let's hope it doesn't escalate further and cooler heads prevail.
Correction: on the Democrats winning or losing the House and the Senate, the correct answer is d, not a.
The only way you could get the Gaza question wrong is if you don't know anything about the Mandate period, the Nakba/"War of Independence," the circumstances of the founding of Israel, or the history/behavior of the state. It's also not a "conflict" or a "war." Here is a metaphor for Gaza: your cat, whom you've abused for its whole life, bites you. In retaliation, you put it in a sack, close the sack, and beat it to death with a hammer. In the process, it manages to scratch you. You then whine about your victimhood.
I did much better than you on the questions I answered, I skipped all the sports junk. But, I am a conservative and it is obviously are left of center, not what the mainstream of America is today, based on the election results.
That was enjoyable, thank you. A possible question might include picking several of the proposed cabinet nominations and predicting which will be confirmed and which will be denied? Yet another might be the total number of dunkeflautes Germany experiences in 2025.
Thanks again for your good work, and hope you have a safe and happy new year.
Ha! I always told my students that contesting grades was always allowed, but the contestation had to be made in writing with a clear explanation. That both cut down on the number of contestations and provided me with a way to sneak in another analytical assignment ;-)
I had a philosophy professor who told us to guess our grade on a paper and justify it in yet another paper. If we guessed too high, we got a grade lower than the actual grade. If we guessed too low and justified it, we got that grade. I guessed too low, and justified it too well, lol.
You get 0 points for both election answers. Dems lost "bigly" in all three sections of the government so why would you claim half a point for the President and Congress results?
I LOVE your approach. Reminds me of a professor who asked me edit a contested test questions to be clearer and provide grading scales for partial points. Very clever that professor.
Regarding electric vehicles being here to stay; many people I know are quite happy with their Teslas, so those EV's deserve to stay. What does not deserve to stay are mandates to force unwilling people to buy EV's by crippling ICE vehicles with draconian regulations. Here in the Great Plains, EV's simply do not have the range, pulling power or temperature flexibility to be universally practical. Who wants an EV pickup which can't pull his bass boat?
Right, they will find their place. And I am sure there are lots of places .
Here in Colorado, who wants an EV that can't keep a charge at 10,000 feet and -20F?
Dr. Pielke -- Did you grade your student this liberally? Half a point each on two election predictions to which your answers were totally wrong? ....because of your internal, unexpressed mental reasoning? tsk tsk.... :-)
Ha!
Or perhaps, a good object lesson in not allowing students to grade their own exams ? ;-)
Not a big predictor or forecaster of any event, but I doubt anyone could have predicted the terrible devastation of Hurricane Helene. STOP: Pray for the men, women and children of Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and surrounding areas. Imagine, if you can, not only losing your home with all its contents, but losing the very soil where your home stood. Imagine all your daily pathways being gone…the very earth your feet walked upon…gone.
That said, for all you Sooners, I correctly predicted the University of Oklahoma football team would not win the SEC.
No one could have predicted the near-miss assassination of Donald Trump. Not a prediction or forecast. It was, without a doubt, a true miracle!
In my opinion, no one can predict or forecast outcome of wars in the Middle East (Gaza, Israel, Iraq, Iran, etc.) because there will never be an end. They have been at war almost since beginning of time, why stop now?
Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, predictions or forecasts won’t matter to the hundreds of thousands who have lost their lives in this debacle, caused almost entirely by the Biden family and the Biden administration’s refusal to negotiate an end very early on. The blood of those thousands upon thousands is on the hands of the Biden family and the Biden administration. Do not doubt it.
I did not predict or forecast nor bet on the election of Donald Trump or republican majority in house and senate, but I prayed constantly that would be the outcome. God always answers our prayers. It’s not always the outcome for which we prayed. My prayers were answered in November..
Ramblings of an elderly great-grandmother who had five uncles who served in WWII. Two were taken prisoners of war, one taken at Bataan, prisoner till end of war. The other was at Pearl Harbor on that fateful Sunday, taken later in war, was on USS Missouri when surrender signed. MAGA
Hi Roger - have you expanded your universe of prediction research to include betting markets? For hurricane forecasts, and much else, betting markets might be superior (as they seem to be for elections and a growing number of others).
Yes, great suggestion!
Going forward, please keep the Bundesliga. Keep the Premier League also as necessary. We need windows to the world and should work to promote the 2026 World Cup coming to America.
Sticking more closely to data, you could have fun predicting currency swings, average cost per kWh charged by utilities to customers, or change in emissions by country or region. You get a chance to analyze a few layers deep what policies have, and have not, been effective.
That's all the spit balling I have for you now. Thank you for your work and best wishes for an outstanding 2025!
Excellent!
The Bundesliga 2 is by far the best league around (look at that table!).
That said, I am pulling for St. Pauli to stay up ;-)
I will pull for FC St. Pauli, except when they have a match with Werder Bremen, our family's hometown team. Just saw the green and white in person dominate FC Union Berlin 4-1. Union Berlin did set off some incredible (prohibited) pyrotechnics worth the delay.
Roger,
Might I please suggest that a major purpose of forecasting is to provide raw material for discussion, leading us to the wisdom of Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, 1776. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Geoff S
Certainly in the mix!
Roger,
Unlike you, I try not to do predictions or projections. This is because they are not typically calculated using data that can be replicated. They also tend to have a component of "belief" which does not mix with hard science.
Why not withdraw from prediction? That might give you more time to work with measured data, much preferred in science, on topics that you are currently doing really well.
Geoff S
I've decided that this stance (withdraw from prediction) is not possible.
Every decision that we make is predicated on a prediction of the consequences of action. A decision is thus a prediction. There are prediction-free actions (see: evolution), but in social systems the question is not predict or not, but how best to incorporate predictions into decisions.
Back in the day, when Dan Sarewitz and I led a big NSF project on prediction in the earth sciences we made up bumper stickers with the bottom line from our project
Check it out
https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/prediction/gifs/question.gif
Roger, you need to update that beautiful bumper sticker. In 2024, it might be Question Any Govt. Issued Report.
We had a debate over whether it should be "Question Predictions" or "Question Prediction" ;-)
" EVs are here to stay ". Hmm. Possibly. Depends how much civil unrest governments are prepared to tolerate, as huge numbers of people see their freedom of mobility stolen from them. And see scarce electricity supplies diverted to EV charging ( in UK at least, where actual power stations are being closed in favour of Miliband's fantasy of renewables ) And other people see the value of their ' investment ' drop like a stone as second hand values of EVs plummet, when potential purchasers become aware of the likely need for hugely expensive replacement batteries. And perhaps even politicians will realise that a ' solution ' that can take 70,000 miles to achieve carbon parity with a proper car, at which point the prospect of battery replacement hoves into view and the massive CO2 emissions cycle starts again, isn't a solution at all. And let's not mention the Felicity Ace, or Gatwick airport carpark fires.
So yes, EVs are here to stay. As a status symbol for rich, virtue-signalling socialists / Democrats, and, here at least, in the form of the traditional battery-powered milk float. As a viable system of mass mobility or industrial transport? Probably not.
I'd guess that the many millions/billions of Tuk Tuks and lots of other practical utility vehicles go EV. So much cleaner (particulates) and simpler (less repairs). As tech advances so will usage IMO.
Roger:
When it comes to having the integrity to review and evaluate your previous predictions, you score 100%.. Let's see if Sable the Soothsayer does that.
Re: Russia’s war on Ukraine will be:
I would suggest that option "d) Escalated (e.g., perhaps involving NATO or nuclear weapons)" was rather poorly worded.
First, a number of analysts have argued that NATO involvement in Ukraine already exists on a number of levels dating back to George W Bush's Bucharest Memorandum in 2008 declaring that Ukraine and Georgia will become part of NATO which set of a firestorm in Moscow causing US Ambassador Bill Burns to issue his famous "Nyet means Nyet" response to the Bush administration. Since at least 2014 NATO countries have been training Ukrainian troops to NATO Standards. NATO involvement is not a response to the war, but the major cause of it.
Secondly, while nuclear weapons haven't been used (fortunately!), Russia has raised its nuclear doctrine, which in effect does escalate things. It's use of their hypersonic missile may also be considered a form of escalation. They now have a battlefield demonstration of weapon for which there is no known defence, and even if not nuclear tipped, can carry a warhead that can do almost as much damage as a tactical nuke.
Let's hope it doesn't escalate further and cooler heads prevail.
Good stuff!
Correction: on the Democrats winning or losing the House and the Senate, the correct answer is d, not a.
The only way you could get the Gaza question wrong is if you don't know anything about the Mandate period, the Nakba/"War of Independence," the circumstances of the founding of Israel, or the history/behavior of the state. It's also not a "conflict" or a "war." Here is a metaphor for Gaza: your cat, whom you've abused for its whole life, bites you. In retaliation, you put it in a sack, close the sack, and beat it to death with a hammer. In the process, it manages to scratch you. You then whine about your victimhood.
I did much better than you on the questions I answered, I skipped all the sports junk. But, I am a conservative and it is obviously are left of center, not what the mainstream of America is today, based on the election results.
Ha!
Though if you are named Michael Johnson you should probably be a fan of the 200m ;-)
That was enjoyable, thank you. A possible question might include picking several of the proposed cabinet nominations and predicting which will be confirmed and which will be denied? Yet another might be the total number of dunkeflautes Germany experiences in 2025.
Thanks again for your good work, and hope you have a safe and happy new year.
Thanks and Happy 2025!
Not clear why you give yourself half points for some of your predictions were clearly wrong. Are you becoming an alarmist? The world wants to know!
Ha! I always told my students that contesting grades was always allowed, but the contestation had to be made in writing with a clear explanation. That both cut down on the number of contestations and provided me with a way to sneak in another analytical assignment ;-)
I had a philosophy professor who told us to guess our grade on a paper and justify it in yet another paper. If we guessed too high, we got a grade lower than the actual grade. If we guessed too low and justified it, we got that grade. I guessed too low, and justified it too well, lol.
You get 0 points for both election answers. Dems lost "bigly" in all three sections of the government so why would you claim half a point for the President and Congress results?
It's Dilbert Day!
I LOVE your approach. Reminds me of a professor who asked me edit a contested test questions to be clearer and provide grading scales for partial points. Very clever that professor.
Was the correct answer really a on the “D’s win houses of congress” question?
Eagle eyes appreciated! +1 point for Sharon.
We're all better together :)
Amen to that!
Yep