Everyone makes mistakes now and then. Sometimes they’re minor math mess-ups. Other times they’re scientific predictions that fail. And occasionally, people seem to be wrong on purpose, getting things spectacularly incorrect in a way that just so happens to suit their agenda. Today we’re taking a quick look at three impressively wrong pieces, one of each type.
First, there’s a story in the Daily Caller that tries and fails to provide “The Real Story” behind a Carbon Brief report on solar beating coal for a month in the UK. Now, this mistake is somewhat forgivable, because the Daily Caller’s not really a “real” news outlet, and the story in question is written by one Craig Boudreau, whose Daily Caller author page describes him as not a reporter or editor or analyst, but as a “reader.” So it seems like he’s a commenter who has been given publishing privileges. In his twitter description, he calls himself “a musically illiterate musician,” and apparently he’s pretty innumerate too, because even a commenter at the Daily Caller calls out his errors. Boudreau claims that solar out-produced coal by only 36%, when in fact it’s 49.6%, which is what Carbon Brief said in the first place. Probably an honest mistake, but, had the Daily Caller any sort of fact checker, one that should have been caught.
Now, arithmetic is one thing, science is another. And, as the old saying goes, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. But deniers who reject mainstream science don’t have much of an excuse when their own predictions fail. And we see a perfect example of this, with what Italian professor Ugo Bardi dubbed yesterday “the Worst Climate Prediction Ever Made.” Denier darling Nicola Scafetta published a 2010 paper that claimed temperatures would plateau or drop, and criticized the accuracy of the IPCC’s 2007 projections. With a single graphic, it’s clear that not only was Scafetta quite wrong about where temperatures were headed, but also that the IPCC projections captured temperatures pretty much perfectly.
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So we see that deniers are failing in basic math and failing with shoddy science. But those are likely honest mistakes. It’s much harder to believe that this next blunder is unintentional. That’s because it comes not from a pseudo-journalist or actual scientist, but from the ever-predictable, perennially-wrong and fossil-fuel-funded Robert Bryce. In a post in the National Review, Bryce inflates the amount of subsidies received by wind by a factor of more than 750, according to a detailed debunking by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).
To make the claim that wind energy gets $176 billion in subsidies, Bryce counted up all the subsidies that the companies who have members on AWEA’s board receive. But this assumes that 100% of the local, state and federal subsidies and federal loans given to, for example, General Electric, go solely to wind. As AWEA points out, only 1/20,000th of the incentives given to GE go to their wind-related work. Even worse, “for other companies on Bryce’s list, none of their incentives actually went to the wind industry” and for one company, he double counts all the incentives, “which causes him to overstate what he falsely claims are incentives to foreign companies by a whopping $734 million.”
Continuing on, 99.9% of the money Bryce claims to be “crony capitalism” isn't even wind-related, 93% of them are actually loan guarantees- meaning he’s counting loans as gifts! But wait, there’s more! Some of the “wind incentives” in Bryce’s list are actually going to fossil fuels, including $492 million for a coal power plant. Amazingly, these aren’t even all the corrections required, as he also gets things wrong when it comes to the Production Tax Credit, and “elementary errors in his understanding of energy.”
In this one column, Bryce got so many things wrong, one can’t help but wonder if perhaps he’s considering running for president…
