there should be people dredging through petabytes of cern data like this, exploratory analysis can give you insight into things you didn't know to look for.
even if you find things that are bogus you figure out why and learn how to avoid it given the context of the data.
to say otherwise becomes a hindrance to progress. plus its not like we have any other way of predicting earthquakes, trying to read the magnetic field to predict events sounds really promising, i'd be willing to give it a shot even if it is bogus, that's just risk assessment.
You can't condemn scientists for looking at data. Not everything can be magicked up from first principles in a vacuum.
No scientist would claim that falsifiable hypothesis and empirical validation aren't needed. But I don't think any scientist would criticise someone for looking for patterns on a whim and pointing it out to others.
A favourite example[0].
I agree with you that if this observation proves to have predictive power, then the way it was found doesn't matter. But right now we're at the less reliable "we looked at all conceivable retroactive combinations of stuff and found this pattern" stage of the process.