There are many articles related to both fact and fiction about when the price of oil will become too expensive. When will oil peak and how can we know? Models predict both that we have plenty of oil while other predict just the oposite. Can statistics lie? who is right ... does anybody know?

“Can statistics lie?”

No. But people can. And some people delight in trying to make other people worry about anything and everything. So intent are they on bringing us down to their level of left-wing defeatism they will lie and lie and lie.

The human race has survived much worse things than the few piddling problems it faces today: the price of oil, the global warming fiction, a few sicko Muslims blowing themselves and mainly their own kind up. On and on it goes. There is plenty of doom and gloom out there if you wish to punish and embitter yourself by listening to it.

Envireconomic, have faith in your own ability to pull through and in that of the people who don’t moan and groan, but who work quietly in the background to come up with answers.

It’s a good life, for most of us, despite what you might read on OLO which has become, unfortunately, a magnet for the embittered and malcontent.

My wife studied statistics and probablity, and statistics can lie and they can be manipulated, and quite often are, it depends on how they are collected, collated, interperted and presented.
The old bar graph, pretty simple you would think, make it wider, thinner, higher, shorter, cut the bottom off, as you can see you can make it appear as anything you want.
100 years ago in New York the papers thundered against women in university "2 out of 3 women marry their professors " true, but what they failed to tell was that sample came from 1 university and there were only 3 female students, too small a sample too give a true picture. A recent statistic I read was 45% of accidents happen on straight roads and 16% on curves, pretty straight forward, but totally meaningless as you don't know what distance is travelled on straight and what on curves, or what % of roads are straight and what are curved.
Just a couple of examples of how you can manipulate data, one of her books I read was full of ways to do this sort of thing.
So as you can see statistics are quite often misleading.

fortunately, you can do a lot just by thinking: there's a fixed amount of oil in the ground. the first wells were just a water pump in an oily swamp. now, new wells are hard to find and difficult to pump. the easy stuff is gone. so the price of oil will certainly rise, and in an increasing curve.

then there's the waste products of using the stuff. this is certainly contributing to global warming, even if there are other factors. so there are strong reasons to start turning away from fossil fuel energy, even if the evidence is presented in bar charts.

Oil companies and governments spend more on trying to find oil than the value of what they find.

alanpoi says:
"Oil companies and governments spend more on trying to find oil than the value of what they find."

Speaking of people lying. What a load of rubbish. Public companies are not in the business of losing money. Why do you think the price at the pump is always changing. Really alan come on!

I think Leigh has summed up OLO very well. I came here looking for reasoned debate and have been very disappointed. All I have found is, as Leigh says so well, "left-wing defeatism" and "the embittered and malcontent".

As for statistics lying....yes easily done...look at the Hockey Stick.