Lite: Are the oil refinery fires a pattern or a coincidence?
On X there are reports of lots of oil refinery fires and accidents. There does seem to be an unusually high number of fires, so I wanted to check if that’s unusual or just random chance.
I encouraged Claude and Gemini to (somewhat) collaborate on compiling a dataset of all the fires at oil refineries over the last six weeks. Then I requested they choose five other six week periods - at random - and check that period for the number of oil refinery fires.
After comparing the current six week period to those random intervals, Claude and Gemini both agree that the rate of fires is very high. Most of this is driven by the war in Ukraine and the Gulf, but even when you exclude those areas, the rate of fires remains highly unusual.
From the report:
“Compared with a Gamma prior fitted to five randomly-chosen historical 6-week windows (mean ≈ 2.2 fires / window), the total count is extreme (tail probability ≈ 5 × 10⁻⁵; Bayes factor ≈ 10⁶). Even after stripping out the war-related strikes, the non-war count of 8 sits in the top ~1% of the prior-predictive distribution (Bayes factor ≈ 92). The conclusion is that the cluster is unlikely to be random noise, but the dominant signal is geopolitical — specifically Ukraine’s systematic targeting of Russian refining infrastructure — rather than a hidden global-industrial anomaly.”
Have a look at the report itself, which is attached below, are there any events missing from the dataset? Is there anything else we can do to improve this? Comments open.
Neat and innovative application of AI. I never thought about this kind of incident before but it hints at just how complex modern life has become and what a can of worms it is.
The interpretation section of the report suggests "A more rigorous version of this comparison would re-count each of the five historical 6-week windows for all energy infrastructure, not just refineries." It would still be contingent on the completeness of historical reporting. Also no weight is given to the severity of the incidents: >10 oil tankers ablaze seems worse than a transformer fire.
Whatever sense you can make of this will help analyse similar questions in future.
There have been 6 Oil Rig explosions around the world in less than 24 hours, the latest one in Texas. This is all orchestrated to manipulate our opinion on s/t concerning energy; prices, Trump, policy - or to make a new policy, to push us in a direction. Whatever the news is telling you about energy - or the war in Iran, be suspicious. Odds are, what you are hearing is said and done to get you on board with a certain opinion about getting someone or something out or putting someone or something in (some policy or person) for THEIR benefit - never for our (the citizens') long term benefit. Be suspicious. Ask yourself, "who benefits if I believe this (believe whatever it is I am being told or fed)?"