He used a very simple technique, which I think is a useful tool for helping someone think more clearly about such stories. The linked article has more details, but the key is the acronym CRITIC, which stands for:

C Claim?

R Role of the claimant?

I Information backing the claim?

T Test?

I Independent testing?

C Cause proposed?

As the author points out in his article, it’s as applicable to corporate PR as it is to new-wave mumbo-jumbo!

Part of me hopes they don’t in case ignorance is viral.

Now, does that mean my brother’s going to die by way of spontaneous breakfast conversion? No, it doesn’t. Dreams don’t predict the future. They never will.

Just because you have a dream that you’re going to die from a tsunami doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. A more likely explanation is that you’re concerned about the devastation wrought by the tsunami a year and a half ago, and your sub-conscious is reflecting this concern.

Fleeing a city in a car isn’t an indication of tsunami. It’s an indication of some kind of disaster befalling a city, be it plague or tsunami or hurricane. Could be anything.

And whatever it is you’re fleeing from in your dream, by no means does it predict the future.

Also, tsunamis don’t have anything to do with weather, so all of the Kyoto agreements or Montreal agreements or Al Gore movies aren’t going to do a lick of difference against earthquakes and tsunamis.

Also also, there’s something called the “shotgun effect”. Most often it’s applied to lawsuits, where someone sues a whole bunch of companies in an effort to make money out of at least one of them. While you probably wouldn’t hear about the cases that this someone loses, the one or two that they might happen to win garner a lot of interest and publicity. The same thing can be applied to “psychics” and “earth sensitives” — they make a whole lot of predictions, and they’re so sweeping and general that one of them is bound to be true, or at least translated to be true. The art comes in making the prediction — if it’s general enough it can apply to almost anything. An excellent example of this “forecasting” is in your paper every day in the horoscope section. They’re so general that you could pick any one (not just the one for your sign) and more often than not it’d apply to you.