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I don't post Trump faux-pas anymore because, well, there's so many, but, but, but... oh, I'll just let the photo speak for itself.





In video message on Dorian, President Trump displays doctored forecast
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09 ... -forecast/

I have no words,,,,

OK
I see the extra portion that's drawn in black but I don't get it. What am I overlooking?

Losbot wrote:OK
I see the extra portion that's drawn in black but I don't get it. What am I overlooking?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09 ... -forecast/

The worst part is he refuses to own his mistakes.

To be fair, I can guarantee that he saw that wide 'probability bubble' over Florida, and just interpreted that as moving left past the point depicted on the map, and thought that it would include Alabama.

Now the rest of us who follow hurricanes and are used to reading NOAA path projection maps understand that the bubble at the end is basically meaningless - it just indicates that there are no predictions past that point.

My 96 year old father would look at that map and probably also assume that Alabama was in danger.

Fine, but this is THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES who presumably just got a detailed briefing. And, sure, anyone can mis-speak, so why can't this guy just shrug it off and let his PR people spin it, or just laugh it off?

Instead he has someone make that ridiculous change to the map with a sharpie, and he spends time on Twitter and an oval office press conference, doubling down and defending his gaffe.

This guy always has to be right, even when he's wrong. It's so laughable.

Can you imagine if Trump fell down the stairs getting off Air Force One, like Gerald Ford did? He'd probably have a press conference the next day, with detailed photos of the stairs showing a badly photoshopped banana peel, and insisting someone had left it there on purpose and that the DOJ was starting an investigation into the matter.

And because he's obsessed with proving he is infallible, he posts this graphic as being the reason he was right about Alabama.

A) This would have been a (slightly) better graphic than the one with the sharpie he used (I guess the large stock inkjet printer in the West Wing wasn't available that day)

B) For those of us who follow hurricane paths all the time, this is a compilation of ALL the computer models. There's some wild and crazy paths in there. You're supposed to ignore outliers, which is why NOAA doesn't publish a chart like this for the public. It's confusing if you don't know how to read it. If they do publish a "spaghetti chart", they publish one the 10 or 12 best models in the past that agree with each other within a certain percentage. Basically you look at the lines that cluster together and throw out the rest, and that's how the simplified (dumbed down?) blue and white "cone" path map on the NOAA site gets made for the general public.

C) AGAIN, I assume he had a full briefing and I'll generously assume he was not just looking at the pretty pictures and deciding he knows better than a meteorologist how to interpret them.

D): If Trump thought Alabama was in danger why didn't he also warn Mexico about that one line going off to the left? Oh yeah, right, it's Mexico.

E): I love the note at the bottom of that graphic. Trump should have read that: "If anything in this graph causes confusion, ignore the entire product."

F): Why doesn't he just let this go? I mean, c'mon. I'm sure his PR people would like to focus on the decent jobs report today, but he keeps stoking the fire. If he hadn't posted the sharpie graphic, this would have already been forgotten.