Australia's Institute of Public Affairs has again demonstrated #HowToLieWithStatistics re #FossilFuel #EnergyTransition. Their report has been picked up by a coal magnate, so expect echoes in www comments.
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Ogge says the report is based on primary energy – all the energy used in the current processes of power generation – not energy demand or even the current delivered energy output of coal-fired power stations. He says that results in a “200% exaggeration of demand figures”.
“With fossil fuels, most of the energy is lost as heat – in coal-fired power stations, 60% is lost as heat,” Ogge says. “They are saying that renewables have to generate enough energy to cover the heat lost by fossil fuels. It’s a crazy assumption.”
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It ignores the availability of solar and windpower arrays for agriculture around the hardware, and also ignores evidence of the benefits to plants and animals in agriculure or wilder land from sharing land with large arrays, e.g. increasing protection from extreme weather events. Oh, and ignores offshore and desert renewable power installations.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/22/gina-rinehart-says-renewable-energy-could-use-one-third-of-australias-prime-agricultural-land-is-she-right
Big Tobacco spent decades fueling science denial, funneling money to sellout scientists who deliberately cast doubt on both sound science and the very *idea* that we could know *anything*. As @TimHarford describes in #TheDataDetective, #DarrellHuff's 1954 classic #HowToLieWithStatistics was part of a tobacco-industry-funded project to undermine faith in statistics itself (the planned sequel was called *How To Lie With Cancer Statistics*):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford
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It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote #HowToLieWithStatistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer.
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Same data, different stories:
How to manipulate the graphs to support your narrative.
How to shape the narrative with graph manipulation without sacrificing your credibility.
The art of tweaking graphs to better support your story.
🔗 https://www.mobilespoon.net/2023/03/same-data-different-stories-how-to-manipulate-your-graphs.html
#HowToLieWithStatistics #statistics #data #datascience #research #sosiology #psychology @sociology #graph #graphs #manipulation #lying
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