Eyes Wide Open by Noreena Hertz

Author:Noreena Hertz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Context and the Coming Armageddon

‘The correct information’.

How elusive that can prove to be.

As we move through this chapter, we’ll see that when it comes to numbers and statistics and surveys and graphs, making sense of them can be much less clear-cut than one might think.

In June 2009 the UK’s low-taxation pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance reported that civil servants were spending £8 million a year on taxis.25 The headlines were predictable enough: ‘How Whitehall Takes us for a Ride’, wrote the Daily Express.26 And £8 million certainly sounds like an extraordinary amount to spend on taxis.

But once again, before you react, ask yourself, what does this figure actually mean?

Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of civil servants. Of course, not all of them take taxis in connection with their job. Let’s say just 20,000 are senior enough – about 4 per cent of the total. Share the £8 million between them, and it comes to about £400 a year each – or just enough for one short £8 taxi ride each a week.27 When that enormous £8 million figure is converted to its real-life context, it doesn’t seem so extravagant after all.

So, the next time you’re given a number, think about who is providing it. Is it their intention to shock? If so, before you react, contextualise it. What does it actually represent? Are you still as surprised?

Focusing on a number’s shock value without stopping to ask whether there is in fact anything really shocking about it is just one way of missing the bigger picture. Another is to fixate on the eye-opening extremes plucked from a spread of results.

Take some highly alarming headlines that appeared in many newspapers in January 2005. ‘Weather Trial Predicts 10°C Rise in British Temperatures’, reported the Daily Telegraph. ‘Global Warming is Twice as Bad as Previously Thought’, warned the Independent. Even the popular-science press was at it: ‘Sizzling Times Ahead for Earth’, said the New Scientist, warning of an even greater potential temperature rise of 11.5°C.28

An increase of eleven degrees Centigrade. Terrifying. A rise of over three degrees is viewed by many scientist as the tipping point beyond which the earth is heading towards a no-return global-warming Armageddon.

But that figure, whether ten or eleven degrees, needed to be considered much more carefully. In this case, you’d need to go back to the original study to get an accurate understanding of what the evidence had really shown.29

For these alarmist headlines stemmed from the first results of a huge experiment organised by scientists at Oxford University, in which people all over the world donated their computers’ down-time to produce 2,000 separate runs of a new climate-change model. The model was designed to simulate what might happen if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from its pre-Industrial Revolution level – a scenario well within the realms of possibility.30

So, did the experiment reveal that most of the computer runs indicated a temperature increase of ten or eleven degrees? No, it didn’t. In fact,

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