The whole thing seems pretty outlandish. But Web Bot might be a caricature of a real possible technology. Not necessarily one that predicts natural disasters, but more general trends in human behavior. I’m thinking in the realm of new slang, purchasing habits, and hobbies.
Not that a successful bot couldn’t be built to study natural phenomenon. I can imagine feeding a machine like this data concerning, for example, past earthquakes and having it build models that predict future earthquakes based on current seismic events. (Probably wouldn’t be accurate to better than 20 years, but hey. That’s something, right?)