Every once in a while I am reminded of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. That once in a while is typically when I see a story about HVAC on the local tee vee. Here’s the latest example.
Here is the video link. Couldn’t figure out how to embed it.
Let’s go!
.23 – “all air conditioners”. Wrong. The rule is that any refrigerant may be used that has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) under 700. For whatever reason (I have some theories) of the six major manufacturers of residential and light commercial HVAC equipment in the USA, five chose using a chemical called R454B, and one (Daikin) chose R32. That was a natural choice for Daikin as they have something in the neighborhood of a quarter billion AC units worldwide running with this chemical.
.44 – biggest stash in the state of Michigan – maybe but I doubt it. Unprovable. He sounds like a carnival barker.
.58 – “every new AC” – again, false
1.00 – they show a photo of a window air during the R454B conversation. Highly unlikely that appliance uses R454B. Virtually all window airs are made in Asia where R32 has been used for some time. R32 has been used in smaller window appliances for years in the USA.
1.07 – they show video of an Amana unit, during the R454B discussion. Amana is a Daikin product and uses R32. Or if that is an older product, it uses R410a.
1.10 – It is said that the old refrigerant is called Freon. Freon is simply a trade name that has been around for decades. The “old” refrigerant is R410a.
1.20 – “all units” – false
1.55 – no manufacturer is allowed to install a freon based unit past Dec. 31. Well, manufactures don’t install anything. Contractors do. That law actually says that you may not install an R410a SYSTEM which includes the inside and outside sections after the end of this year. You may install an inside, OR an outside portion indefinitely. The manufacture of R410a units was ended Dec. 31, 2024.
2.26 – “the new refrigerant has been used in Europe and Asia”. False. R454B is a brand new chemical and hasn’t been used anywhere in the world besides the USA for this new equipment rollout. R32, on the other hand HAS been used in Europe and Asia and the rest of the world for the better part of a decade with no real issues.
There are a few more things in that piece that are wrong but the explantions would be long and very nuanced.
I would be interested if our readers have experienced seeing a news story focusing on a field that they specialize in and seeing a ton of obvious errors.
I’m not by any means an electrical engineer, but I do have a basic understanding of electricity. And I observe that the writers of the majority of articles about energy storage don’t seem to grasp the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Which is pretty essential if you’re writing about energy storage.
I see this not just in the general media, but also in the business media and the ‘tech’ media.
The “ozone hole” was a refrigerant” scam.
Having a few areas of specialized knowledge myself, it always amazes me how much the “news” gets wrong, and yet many of us have an insatiable desire to read the “news” to find out what’s going on. We know it is not factual, but we read it anyway!
@David Foster – I’m also not an EE, but must have at least rudimentary knowledge about electricity for HVAC and I hear that error all the time as well. @Ber – Gell-Mann Amnesia effect explained.
I have a slight technical interest in firearms because of an odd period in my past. So, occasionally I will read an article having to do with firearms: comparing two calibers, reviewing a new model, etc. One thing that really bothers me is that the authors almost always call MV (the product of mass time velocity) the “kinetic energy” of the projectile. This is not the kinetic energy, it is the momentum!
Kinetic energy is actually ½MV^2 (one-half mass times velocity squared). This is important, because it means that kinetic energy is very dependent on velocity, much more-so than most people realize. Which is why the small round used in the M16 is surprisingly lethal. Well, nobody but a nerd like me would care about such a thing, but I expect someone writing about a subject to have a better grasp of the fundamentals.
I would be more interested if anyone has an example of a general news outlet getting anything with even a whiff technical complexity right. I note that the modern affectation that requires 3-5 reporters to process even the simplest narrative. I also note how rarely these platoons of reporters backed by layers of editors and fact checkers mange to string as many as three sentences together without mangling English syntax and grammar as well as plain logic beyond human understanding. You would think “professionals” who have taken up a career of communication would have made an effort to achieve the most basic competence in their chosen vocation. They truly know nothing about everything.
The renaissance man is the true victim in all of this. The pain inflicted by these retard ‘journalists’ is incalculable. Even retreat into fiction holds no consolation these days unless one is content to venture into the measurably saner past.
I was a nuclear engineer brought out to Boston to do a safety calculation on a plant near Plymouth, MA.
While standing in the plant, an alarm went off over a door. One comes in to check and quickly leaves. Soon, another worker does the same. The alarm goes out.
Driving to the airport, we hear a brief statement over the AM radio saying there had been a minor high radiation alarm in one room and all was resolved. An “Unusual Event” had been declared and exited.
A probe then send into various parts of the core to measure neutrons had retracted a bit too far and was outside its shielding so the room radiation alarm went off. No one was in the room and no one got any dose. Trivial, day-to-day event.
When I arrived back in California the San Francisco Chronicle had a big article about that event. I copied it and marked up 21 factual errors in the piece and sent the markup to the paper’s editor. After all, I had been RIGHT there when it happened, got a degree in nuclear engineering, and so on. They would appreciate the better information, right?
Got a letter back telling me the author was their prize-winning science editor but no retractions, no corrections, no apologies.
@Whitehall awesome story thanks for sharing.
When Jonas Salk was developing the polio vaccine, there was one particular science reporter that he insisted in communicating with exclusively. This guy:
https://www.bellisario.psu.edu/assets/uploads/Troan_Interview.pdf
A lot of articles & posts refer to ‘profit’ without clarifying the difference between gross profit, operating income, pretax net income, and after-tax net income…all very different things.
I also think a lot of people referring to ‘bonus depreciation’, ‘immediate expensing’, etc do not have enough conceptual understanding of accounting to have any idea what they are talking about.
Goes double for ‘intangible drilling costs’ in oil & gas industries.
Here’s a good example of badness:
https://nypost.com/2025/07/06/us-news/couple-killed-in-wine-cellar-mishap-with-dry-ice-as-they-prep-for-july-4-bash-reports/
Very simple, the dry ice sublimated and displaced the breathable air in the cellar, CO2 being more dense than air. The victims descended into it and were overcome, no chemical reaction and I’ll even spot them the substitution of melt for sublime which they do, finally seem to come close to in the last paragraph. The danger coming from storing a large quantity of dry ice in a poorly ventilated space. That doesn’t seem to be mentioned. Unfortunate, had they kept it in the kitchen, everything would have been OK.
Instead a muddled mess.