Media mistakes

alanofcleeves said:

Just seen this reported on BBC News Website... ​

Climate change: Jet fuel from waste 'dramatically lowers' emissions​

A new approach to making jet fuel from food waste has the potential to massively reduce carbon emissions from flying, scientists say.
Currently, most of the food scraps that are used for energy around the world are converted into methane gas.
But researchers in the US have found a way of turning this waste into a type of paraffin that works in jet engines.
The authors of the new study say the fuel cuts emissions by 165% compared to fossil energy.

Doesn't anyone understand percentages anymore?
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The next paragraph says:
"This figure comes from the reduction in carbon emitted from airplanes plus the emissions that are avoided when food waste is diverted from landfill."
So it seems they are saying that they are getting 100% reduction from not using oil PLUS 65% from diverting food waste from landfill.

I have no real idea if that is mathematically valid :dunno:
 
MikeSh said:
I have no real idea if that is mathematically valid
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It could be, but I don't think so in these circumstances. Suppose x amount of conventional jet fuel emits 100 tons of CO2. Replacing the jet fuel with some fuel with zero net emissions reduces the overall CO2 to zero, which is a 100% reduction. Fair enough.

If the replacement fuel absorbed 165 tons in being created, but only emitted 100 tons (seems very unlikely), then you have a reduction of 165% CO2 emissions over conventional fuel.

But those maths don't work here. The food waste being diverted from landfill is still contributing CO2 - just not by going into landfill. If the basic figures are accurate, then I think it's a 35% reduction (ie the bio-fuel emits 65% the CO2 that kerosene would).
 
This deserves further discussion, I think. Reducing food waste might achieve even more savings, and there is an enormous hidden waste in meat production, so there might be a case for including that in the equation.

The story also complicates things by having two greenhouse gases, CO2, a basic end product greenhouse gas, and CH4, a greenhouse gas that can be primary, ie, emitted into the air, or secondary, ie, used as fuel to produce COx.

Using waste as a source of energy is not new. This is just a headline grabbing story.
 
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Heard on the BBC Today programme this morning:

...Angela Merkel and other EU countries...
 
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Scrat said:
Heard on the BBC Today programme this morning:

...Angel Merkel and other EU countries...
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What lazy journalism. I can think of at least three better ways to say that.
  • Merkel and some other EU leaders;
  • Germany and some other EU countries;
  • Some EU countries.
Unless - Did I miss Merkel becoming a country?
 
There was a bit of a laugh on Breakfast yesterday morning, in Carol's weather forecast: the in-betweening for the graphics got cocked up, so while the rainfall map was being extrapolated for a few hours for Thursday morning, the day/hour display in the bottom right corner rolled back through a whole week!
 
Can’t even make alternative sense out of that. The person closing the plant leads ( in the style of the Pied Piper) something somewhere. Doesn’t work.
 
I would have thought the real headline would be "plant closure" as RobH1 says. I was having trouble trying to construct an alternative reality. :D
 
RobH1 said:
I'll kick-off with this from Wales Tourism:

"Kenfig NNR is a favourite refuge for wildfoul all year round"
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Some 50-odd years ago some people I knew did research for something known as the Roskill Commission on what people thought should be the site of the third London airport. The various suggested sites would mostly involve despoiling large amounts of countryside apart from Maplin Sands (also known as Foulness) an area of wetlands off the Essex coast. The opinion research was conclusive: most people favoured the wetlands site which was duly recorded by the Essex County Standard with a large headline saying: 'MAJORITY IN FAVOUR OF FOULNESS'. Some years later I had a summer job with this paper and found that there was actually a competition between reporters on sneaking dubious or indecent headlines past the sub-editors. Their greatest triumph came in 1972 in the heading for a report of Clacton Council's Works and Amenities Committee. This body had commissioned a report into the cost of building a lock up shed to store the beach deckchairs rented out by the council during the summer. They were given an estimate of £75. A week later the ECS printed a report of the meeting headed: 'ERECTION TO COST £75'.
 
Hounddogman said:
Some years later I had a summer job with this paper and found that there was actually a competition between reporters on sneaking dubious or indecent headlines past the sub-editors.
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A reporter from a local paper on a careers visit to my school back in the early 70s told of a football report headlined "Dorking Overcomes Tough Maidenhead".
 
I remember small booklets printed years ago, one called "What the papers didn't mean to say" and " The black and white misprint show".

One line springs to mind about the explorer Vivian Fuchs, the headline read "Fuchs off again!"
 
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