John Allen Paulos is a math professor and pundit with a reputation for poking fun at educated but
mathematically illiterate people.
He even wrote a popular book
about innumeracy, the inability to
deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of numbers and
chance.
Paulos is genuinely irked by
individuals who have university
degrees but cannot quantify. This
makes them vulnerable to scams
and pseudoscience, he says. Paulos also is convinced a sizeable
chunk of adult Americans couldn't
pass a simple test on percentages,
decimals, or fractions.
I recently happened upon
what may be an example of the
innumeracy Paulos ridicules. Surprisingly, it was in a publication
directed at graduate engineers.
The subject was carbon sequestration. The author quoted a professor of environmental engineering as saying, "Thirty percent of
carbon dioxide emitted into the
atmosphere originates from fossil-fuel-fired power plants."
Whoa. Thirty percent of all carbon dioxide? A quick look at the
Wikipedia page for atmospheric
carbon dioxide turns up the fact
that the sum total of all man-made
carbon-dioxide emissions account
for only about 5% of the CO2 in the
atmosphere. What the professor
certainly had meant was that 30%
of man-made CO2 came from power
plants. That comes out to a much
less ominous sounding 1.5% of total atmospheric CO2.
It's not clear whether the author
of this piece realized the discussion
centered on a relatively small percentage of the atmosphere's CO2. The writer seemed oblivious to the
comparative magnitudes involved.
Unfortunately, it's easy to
find other comments in the media that seem toarise out of a similar cluelessness. Even politicians making decisions on greenhouse gas legislation are apparently prone to the
same cognitive problem. When
California politicians quote findings that their state is the world's
12th-largest source of greenhouse
gases, for example, one wonders
whether they understand this
statistic pertains only to emissions that are man-made. It's fair
to ask whether these politicians,
given such information, could calculate California's contribution to
atmospheric greenhouse gases as
a percent of the total.
On this point, Paulos' comments about innumerate political-office holders are not comforting. He relates the story of a
1980 Presidential candidate who
reportedly had to ask his press
entourage how to convert 2/7 to a
percentage, in an effort to help his
son with a homework problem.
Innumeracy about CO2 levels is
unfortunate because the topic has
become politicized. For my part, I
suspect a better numerical understanding of CO2 levels would lead to
more skepticism about the agendas
of some radical environmentalists.
Instead, we create hot air with
arguments that don't have much to
do with legitimate CO2 science. And
that's too bad. People who might
otherwise concur about the need
for alternative-energy schemes instead get locked into name calling
and acrimonious CO2 debates.
And that brings us to the
"green" themed issue you see in
front of you. There are a variety
of reasons why research into nonfossil-fuel-power generation is a
good idea, even if its impact on
greenhouse gases is zilch.
— Leland Teschler, Editor