Quotes About Forecasting

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.

An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

Very few economists foresaw the crisis, but a great many have tried retrospectively to explain it, generating a large literature of distinctly mixed quality.

It is a common fault of men not to reckon on storms in fair weather.

we tend to visualize future events very poorly and with a deficit of proper imagination.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

you can't have an effective bonus program if you don't have a forecasting system that's taking people forward to where they want

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it... but those who remember the future can plan ahead for the weather.

What is the purpose of budgeting? Most

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

History shows us that people are terrible about guessing what is going to happen - next week, next month, and especially next year.

Experts' forecasts will always be wrong. It is simply impossible to predict with any useful degree of precision how disruptive products will be used or how large their markets will be. An important corollary is that, because markets for disruptive technologies are unpredictable, companies' initial strategies for entering these markets will generally be wrong.

What Are You Planning to Do? The second question I ask is, "What do you plan to do in your meetings?" The options are endless. But once I know what happens in a small group, I can predict with uncanny accuracy who will come and who won't.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

If producers knew not only what consumers want now, but what they will want in the future, their job would be pretty easy.

Ceraunoscopy, n. Divination by thunder and lightning.

More Weather Divinations. — Ceraunoscopy, n. Divination by thunder and lightning.

No matter how many determinants of health we throw in the mix, we will never be able to perfectly predict who will experience good health.

The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.

Everyone knew that the weather was such a system—aperiodic. Nature is full of others: animal populations that rise and fall almost regularly, epidemics that come and go on tantalizingly near-regular schedules. If the weather ever did reach a state exactly like one it had reached before, every gust and cloud the same, then presumably it would repeat itself forever after and the problem of forecasting would become trivial.

The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather—and to a global forecaster, small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly. Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.

Weather forecasting was the beginning but hardly the end of the business of using computers to model complex systems.