Prediction is dangerous to your reputation.

If you don’t make a clear prediction (a climate cycle, a solar cycle, a financial trend…) then you are just doing your best. What comes does not damage your reputation.

One way to predict is to reproject on a regular basis, called ‘moving the goalposts’. David Hathaway of NASA illustrates this strategy, as show in a recent post at WUWT.

Here is Hathaway’s most familiar graphic, which has an active sun in the background. Perhaps it is time to update that background to something more reflective of the times…..oh wait, read on.

Here in this graphic, from Klimadebat.dk we can see how much has changed since Hathaway’s last prediction update in October 2008:


Click for a larger image

Note that Hathaway did indeed change background graphics from October to January. Its just not quite the smooth and nearly featureless ball we see today.

Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximum in March 2006: 145
Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximum in October 2008: 137

Hathaway’s predicted Cycle 24 maximum in January 2009: 104

I’d say that represents a sea change in thinking, but the question now is: How low will he go?

I was looking for a substantial quote from Hathaway in his prediction page, but it appears he is being quite conservative in his language, focusing mostly on methodology, not the prediction itself. I don’t blame him, he’s in a tough spot right now.

Anthony, you are too kind. The update from Hathaway makes no mention of the previous failed prediction.

By moving the goalpost, you never have to acknowledge you missed it. If you move goal, you don’t need nearly as many excuses.

The thing about goals is that moving them maintains your reputation, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who really care about the science, who lead, who grow and discover things… those people use prediction to show what they don’t know, where they went wrong, reject bad theories and work to fix it. Hathaway is a consensus scientist, whereby the models of other researchers are weighted according to their reliability at any time. Nobody is wrong in this fluid consensus model. No theory is ever falsified. Everyones get funded next year.

The following quote from Hathaway’s update illustrates how consensus science makes a mockery of scientific method.

We have employed these methods along with several others to determine the size of the next sunspot cycle using a technique that weights the different predictions by their reliability. [See Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann J. Geophys. Res. 104, 22,375 (1999)]