Innumeracy Watch

I have no comments on the main point of this article expressing skepticism about Peak Oil.  It's not an issue that I have personally researched very much, though my sense is that when it comes to oil we've got most of the low-hanging fruit at least.  (There are other reasons besides Peak Oil to get off our petroleum addiction, like global warming and resource nationalism).  In any case, I wanted to call attention to an instance of innumeracy in a popular scientific article:

The reason we have seen so many bad guesstimates is that even the most advanced technology can't tell us how much crude the Earth holds. No method has been devised to search for new reserves with precision, or even to gauge the true size of known reservoirs. While the mainstream view is that oil resources are finite, no one knows just how finite they are.

Far from being merely the "mainstream view" it is absolutely certain that oil resources are finite.  After all, the volume of the earth is friggin finite ferfecksake!  Anyone who claimed that oil resources were infinite would be certifiably loony.  Perhaps someone might think that the earth produces oil just as fast as we can pump it out, but that wouldn't count as an infinite supply unless they also thought that the earth produces oil faster when we increase our rate of extraction AND that it will continue to do so into perpetuity.  Specifically, the only way anyone could plausibly claim that oil supplies were not finite (i.e., infinite) would be to claim that no matter what our rate of extraction we will always have more oil.  That's crazy talk. Furthermore, "finite" doesn't come in degrees; two is just as finite as ten billion.  It's hard to have much confidence in the author or Newsweek's editors, though there may be valuable information in the article for all I know.

Comments

[MC Spanky McGee]

Hey buddy, I already solved our energy crisis. That's 'cause I know where all the oil is.

http://soupytrumpet.com/?p=262

All we gotta do it go get it.

Du-uh!

[amy]

Yeah. It's disturbing there and it's disturbing in the K-12 science and language-arts texts I edit, but I don't see change coming anytime soon. If there's a real two-cultures split, I think that's where it is, math and humanities/soc-sci/arts.

No doubt you've already heard the Verizon innumeracy audio -- if not, try http://biocurious.com/units-are-important .

Actually we had an unintentional graph-reading breakthrough in the ELA texts lately. The idea of the graph's having a context showed up in one question, then went away. My sense, by the way, is that many of the state ed boards have real math people writing their math standards, and that the problem is to do with the ed colleges, the teachers (esp. the non-math teachers), & the sense of what's actually possible in the classroom, given the problems and distractions the kids show up with. (Iowa City's getting some shock treatment in that now.) A secondary problem is that the aim is to boost the academically-worst students over the NCLB standards, which means any sense of play, anything that makes math lively, anything that distracts from subject time in non-math subjects is out the window. I don't think things were actually enormously better when I was doing K-12 time in the 70s and 80s, but I think the teachers had more freedom in what and how they taught. The stuff we write for them now basically moves their arms and legs for them -- "say this to the class, now put this on the overhead, now pass out that," etc. And every single thing has to be pegged to subject test standards.

I know you're looking at policy issues, but when I think of innumeracy, I think of endless scam opportunity. If you can't think in terms of future value and risk, you're screwed when it comes to money, law, medical treatment, any number of the basic things you have to take care of as a private citizen. I don't think it matters what kind of legislation we pass; if people can't tell a good deal from a bad, they're in trouble.

[opit]

Couple of places you might want to have a look at
http://www.theoildrum.com/
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/