“A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages. “ (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator, retrieved on May 5, 2016)
Every so often, we hear academics and politicians using the performance indicators to demonstrate the progress the country has made in tackling various problems. Without understanding what is KPIs and how they should be used; we can be easily misled. As defined in Wikipedia in the opening quote, KPI is a type of performance measurement. When there are too many parameters, a metric is devised to combine these parameters into a single indicator. Applied within reasons, the indicator is useful for benchmarking the relative state of the organization or activity over a period of time or with other organizations. They are in no way absolute.
Unfortunately, if too many parameters are combined to form an indicator, the indicator may become meaningless or ambiguous. In this case, the practice is to use many different indicators for various aspects to the issue. For example, in assessing the economic status of a country, some of the indicators used are:
- GDP - Gross domestic product
- GNI - Gross national income
- MDGs (Millennium development goals) indicators
- Consumer Price Index
- CES - Current Employment Statistics
- Housing Starts
- Manufacturing Trade Inventories and sales
- Standard & Poor 500 Stock Index.
- National debts - local and foreign
- National reserves
More often than not, more than one indicator is required for a meaningful assessment of any situation. In some cases, we may have to devise local indicators that are more relevant for the local context.
As we can see from the above, anyone using only one or two indicators to prove a point is likely to be advocating a position. For the uninitiated, their arguments can be very convincing and overwhelming. Such arguments should, however, be rejected outright it is not meant to educate but to mislead.
On a related subject, what is shocking is the Paris climate conference (COP21). The European Commission on Climate Action (http://bit.ly/1Sp6Zj9) reported:
“At the Paris climate conference (COP21) in December 2015, 195 countries adopted the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate deal.
The agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C.”
It would appear that the whole climate-change issue is defined by one indicator - temperature or more accurately global mean temperature. The cause of climate change is also reduced to a single cause - carbon dioxide emissions.
The global mean temperature has no physical meaning. They take thousands of temperature measurement around the world, adjust them for various reasons and then take the mean as the indicator for global warming. The temperature anomaly is of the order of 1 to 2 degree C, so I wonder what is the magnitude of their adjustments.
Global warming, if any, is about atmospheric energy. Since the energy can take many forms that are not easily measured or calculated, they chose to ignore that and have settled on the one indicator. This is despite the fact many extreme weather events like hurricanes, cyclones and blizzards; surge storms and floods are all energy related. Without getting the fundamentals right, I am afraid we will be lost. The expensive actions advocated are futile in addressing the real problem.
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