This week Secretary of Energy Moniz tweeted that US CO2
emissions are way down using the chart shown above. I looked at the chart and came to the
conclusion that it is true that CO2 emissions are reduced from a decade ago, but
and a big but during the three years Ernie Moniz has been secretary of energy
emissions have not gone down at all.
Therefore Dr. Moniz was simply pointing out his own incompetence by
publicizing the chart.
When I pointed this out to friends who are so left they can
never be right, they complained that I dislike Moniz. When I pointed this out to right wing nuts
who deny global warming, they agreed Moniz was ineffective and went further that
he should be impeached for wasting tens of billions of dollars. The interpretation of data is subject to the
bias of the beholder.
I then tested the hypothesis on what right wing nuts would
say about the success of solar energy.
These climate change deniers who make Stevie Wonder have twenty twenty
vision present charts the show massive growth in the gigawatt hours of solar
generation and then disqualify this as still only contributing 0.9% of all the electrons
in the grid. Left wing nuts looking at
the same data came to the conclusion that in a decade all fossil fuel fired
power generation station will be shut.
Of course I concluded that PV is highly successful and will play a very
useful niche role that will grow to approximately 10% in power generation.
People are highly biased and the data are interpreted to reinforce
the bias. Honest interpretation of data
requires impartiality and actually not looking at only the mean of the data but
the variance within the data set. I know
a professor of decisions sciences at Stanford named Sam Savage who wrote a
textbook titled The Flaw of Averages.
Sam says “plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average.”
Over 40 years ago I wrote a master thesis on business
decisions using statistical distributions.
The results of my research were then used in gold mining and the decisions
under great uncertainty to invest large amounts of capital in a gold mine. That is why I look at all data presented to me
critically and make more profound interpretations of what the data tell. I must admit though when Ernie Moniz presents
any data I just laugh as I know this guy is the living embodiment of Alfred E.
Neuman and is a joke of an energy secretary.
