My Love of Statistics Apparently Makes Me a "Conspiracy Theorist" and I'm More than Okay with That

"Seems like you need to educate yourself about weather and climate," says an online stranger to me, after I point out that Weather Modification and Geoengineering are very REAL phenomena being practiced all over the world.

The irony here is that I am likely more educated than this internet stranger on these particular topics. My mind has never been blown quite as hard as when I learned about the future of Geoengineering, and the shocking ways in which facts are being turned into fiction in this day and age.

The difference between a Bachelor's of Science in Geography and a Bachelor's of Art in Geography was solely in the Statistics courses required for the Bachelor's of Science. I gladly chose to take those statistics courses, "for science!"

Fully prepared to suffer through these courses, I had no idea that I was the type of dweeb who would downright LOVE statistics! Each new chapter in the textbook provided me a new way of viewing the world, especially through the lens of science, research, and the news. As a natural skeptic, these statistics courses provided me the knowledge I had previously been missing in order to make properly-informed decisions about the world.

The courses I took included:

-Statistics 101

-Statistics for Geography

-Statistics for Population

-Geographic Research Methods

The professors and textbooks for these courses outlined the many ways in which data are manipulated to create statistical falsehoods, typically utilized to mislead a casual observer into believing the falsehood and acting in a desired way as a result. I also had the pleasure of applying these statistics skills to research projects in courses such as Global Regional Climate, Global Change, Geography & Urban Planning, and several GIS courses.

After all this, here I am proudly wearing the title of "Conspiracy Theorist" in contrast to the unknowing casual observer, and I'll share a bit about why that is.

1. Statistics wording is easily manipulated to twist or even reverse the truth.

There are many examples of results being either discarded or altered when they fail to show the outcome desired by stakeholders. Selective reporting focuses on the desired results and omits inconvenient truths about the data.

2. Studies can be arranged and carried out in a way that seeks a desired outcome rather than a truthful outcome.

   Flawed or poor quality data that are used will yield flawed results. From small sample sizes to manufactured outcomes, the design of experiments can be manipulated to favor a desired result. False causality can be easily portrayed as an ultimate truth. Data dredging involves seeking a desired result from a large selection of data.

   
   
   
   

3. Studies that yield an undesirable result for stakeholders will be shared with the public using an altered focus to redirect attention from the truthful outcome to a minor --and potentially false -- trend in the data instead.

   With the use of data dredging, large trends in data can be ignored, and particular trends can be manufactured using carefully-selected data. Cherry-picking is a tactic used by researchers to omit certain unfavorable trends and only highlight the desired data and results.

   
   

4. The source for the data may specialize in the topic, but may not be educated in Statistics.

   
   
   
   

5. The data quality is not ideal or is flawed.

As far as Geoengineering and Weather Modification, what I have found is a complete lack of available data, and a huge gap in the logic applied to these topics. I am only left to believe that this lack of data is intentional, so that blame cannot be placed on the programs if and when things go awry.

Multiple of my college course textbooks covered the topics of Weather Modification and Geoengineering. In fact, I had to write a paper on my opinion about Geoengineering, and it was my opinion that we should NOT be further affecting the climate, so that we may avoid unintended consequences that may worsen the current condition of the already-compromised climate. The textbooks and articles we read dictated that Geoengineering would be a last-ditch effort to save the climate from falling out of its current equilibrium. Nobody in my class advocated FOR the use of Geoengineering even in such efforts, as it carries more risks than benefits to fill our atmosphere with metallic nanoparticles and other chemicals.

If humans are changing the climate, how are we supposed to tease apart climate change that results from greenhouse gases from climate change that results from chemical interference? The data for both are intermingled and virtually indistinguishable.

Since these climate-manipulation programs are taking place, we can no longer blame only mother nature or greenhouse gases for extreme weather events. When fire insurance and flood insurance get cancelled in the most vulnerable areas, who then will pay for repairs to a moldy house that got flooded as a result of cloud-seeding, as seen in Dubai? Insurance companies can and have ensured that they will not be the ones to do so, and the responsibility will lie on the property owners rather than those who are manipulating the weather.

It is this lack of data or intermingled data that will serve to protect those who are tinkering with our climate and weather, no matter the devastating consequences. On top of this hidden truth, the powers that be have successfully convinced a majority of the population that these programs do not exist in the first place.

Each time we have extreme weather, anthropogenic climate change is blamed. We must now account for Geoengineering and Weather Modification in our climate change data, to determine whether these programs ultimately do more harm than good. If these interventions turn out to be the right answer to Climate Change, I might be more on board with the chemical poisoning of our atmosphere and environment that results from it. However, as of now we are not provided the opportunity to observe such data as it is not available.

Weather modification programs date back to the Vietnam War and have been used ever since. Immediately after Cloud-Seeding programs began in Lake Tahoe in the 80's, a new epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (formerly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) hit Lake Tahoe immediately after. At the time, the local newspaper even featured both topics on the same page:

As a lover of statistics, I am well aware that correlation does not equal causation. However, several people held on to the articles in these papers as a result of their skepticism of the new cloud-seeding operations, and in an effort to monitor the possible consequences. Some believe that this cloud-seeding resulted in a record Winter in that area:

Currently, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a silent pandemic with millions of bedridden sufferers unable to determine the cause of their illness. A complete lack of viable research has left these people in the dust, with no cause for the illness found to this day.

Come to think of it, with chronic and autoimmune illnesses on the rise, it is perplexing that limited-or-no health and environmental studies have been performed to test the consequences of pumping metals like Silver Iodide into the air.

This connection simply wouldn't matter to healthy individuals or to those who do not believe in Geoengineering or Weather Modification in the first place. It must be nice to be so blissfully ignorant, and at times I truly wish that I was unaware of all this as well.