As someone who started his blog in 2021, I tend to run a little bit behind the cultural curve. However, something happened on June 7 (6-7) of this year that might have me, if not ahead, at least in step with 2025’s pop culture phenomenon. What has happened in the past six months also hearkens back to 2024’s rap feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Except this time it’s a weather nerd beef (with Matt Laubhan – formerly of Tupelo’s WTVA and now with MS Live Weather).
You’ll need to watch the video above to get the full story, but essentially Matt posted a viewer-submitted severe weather photo to Facebook and, in his analysis, made two claims. Namely, the “dark gray funnel shape” is:
1. likely not a funnel cloud
2. a reflection from the dash
That explanation and the comments it received set me on a journey that has combined many of my favorite topics — meteorology, optics, psychology, logical fallacies, critical thinking skills, peer review, misinformation on social media, responsible/ethical science communication, and even artificial intelligence (AI). And, of course, some music was involved as well.
In my mind, this case can be cracked by knowing some basics about optics. If you’ve listened to my song, “ROY-G-BV,” you know that white light is a combination of the colors in the visible spectrum. So the brighter and whiter an object, the more light (of all colors) it is sending in the direction of the observer, while dark things are sending very little visible light.
When we are looking at the outside world from inside a vehicle, light can be reflected from surfaces inside the vehicle off the windshield. This introduces “noise” into the “signal” — that is, we can still see the outside world, but it is obscured by additional reflected light. We don’t see things as clearly as we would without the windshield because the windshield is introducing additional light along our line of sight.
The optical problem that cuts to the heart of Matt’s analysis is that a shadow is just an absence of light that stands in contrast with better-illuminated areas. As my former student says in the video above, “You can’t reflect a shadow.”
Long story short is that I don’t think Matt is right when it comes to either of his claims. I’ve made this known to him and yet, at time of writing, his original Facebook post — which I can only describe as meteorological misinformation — remains in its original form.
At the end of my video, I pose to my student the same question I have asked of Matt Laubhan in person and via email — what does an honest and ethical science communicator do about the Facebook post at this point? What do you think Matt should do?