Two items this week reminded me of bomb lobbing. One item happened to be about the Sun’s activity.  The other about hurricanes.  They could have been about any number of subjects.  Whatever the subject, they would have brought me back to bomb lobbing.

The article on the Sun ran in a major British science journal. It described how the Sun’s activity lately has caused major head-scratching for scientists. They assumed some things about global warming and cooling were connected to the Sun’s activity. But lately they are not sure. “We need to study this more,” say the scientists.

The piece on hurricanes said that most big-time scientific hurricane forecasters were wrong again this season. (Wait. The season is not entirely over.) Most such forecasters have whiffed the last several years. You would not want to rely on them to pick your stocks. Unless you stocked up on extra shirts, to replace the ones you lose.

What ought to be clear to us is that these experts don’t know this stuff. Any more than you or they know if  IBM will go to $400. Or who will be in the money in the fifth race at Aqueduct.

They have satellite data enough to choke all the horses at Aqueduct. They have the history. They have the computers. They have theories piled as high as skyscrapers. But they don’t know this stuff.