Immortality

Ken Ring seeks immortality by getting people to believe he is capable of predicting weather by phases of the moon.

Ken and his supporters haven't realised that weather organisations actually keep records of weather and if there were a correlation between weather and moon phases, they would probably have noticed by now.

Unfortunately, lots of people prefer bullshit over science and Ken has a following.

Because of his spurious claims regarding the Christchurch earthquake - made after the event, of course! - we have been taking Ken on in a weather challenge.

The results, and Ken's claims, are most interesting, with this being the best of them all:

In 2009 a group of schoolchildren went on a camp in the Central Plateau. There was wild weather but the NZ Metservice cancelled their severe weather warning on the morning of 10 April. On the strength of that a supervisor took a group of schoolchildren into the hills. Either 5 or 6 drowned, can't remember which. In my almanac on that day, written 2 years before, I had heavy rain for the Central Plateau. Anyone who had my book would not have taken children into the ranges on that date.
 

Yes, Ken is claiming he could have stopped the Mangatepopo tragedy.

We decided to take a critical look at Ken's claim and see what evidence he could produce to support it.

Ken kindly posted a copy of his weather almanac from 2008. (Note Ken even gets the year wrong.)

Here it is:

Note that counting from the top, Ken actually predicts heavy rain for Taumarunui on the 13th, and National Park on the 14th.

How own evidence shows that he is lying - he predicted no heavy rain in the entire central North Island on the 15th April. The Coroner's inquest into the tragedy confirms that the river was not high at the time the children entered the canyon, and that it rose quickly in a flash flood, caused by rain on the day, upstream. Heavy rain that Metservice predicted and Ring, despite his claims, did not.

His claim that he could have averted the tragedy is an outright lie.

Pay $30 for a month's forecasts from Ken at your peril.

 

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