Denailist Proves Global Warming Fraud - Provided You Don't Understand Science

One of the things about denialists that annoy me is that they either prey on those will little science education by jiggery-pokery or they themselves don't understand science and so assume if they don't get it, then it's not true. Problem is that whether or not a physical (climate change) or natural process (evolution) is true is nothing to do with whether or not we understand it. That's why science is not a 100% process - humans have to try an understand complex processes.

So here's a classic example of that reliance on a lack of understanding in action....

A denialist produces a graph based on raw, unajusted data that 'proves' the scam of global warming. Here's the graph:



The red is the adjusted temparure record and the blue the raw data. So what is being claimed is that the adjustments are hiding the truth - the planet is not warming but cooling. Except that... except that and except that - this is from a single site of the hundreds of sites that have a temperature record. So if this is the case we'd see the same pattern again and again. (There are good reasons why the adjustments are used, but that's another story...)

Another blogger has helpfully compiled a graph of all the adjustments:



What this shows is on the horizontal axis the amount of adjustment in degrees an on the vertical axis the (and I am deliberately simplifying this a little) amount of adjustments made. What can clearly be seen is that the majority of adjustments are of the value zero (no changes made) and the vast majority fall within 0.2 either side of zero (a tiny adjustment that could not account for the temperature changes we see as being fraud) and a tiny, tiny minority having a change of more than 0.5 degrees.

This also gives you the reveal on the denalist's graph trick - the reason it is only one site is that he has cherry-picked the outlier, the one set of readings that have the greatest change, and used these as a dishonest illustration about all the readings.

It's a shallow sham trick but sadly, people who either don't want to know the truth or who have too little education to understand, fall for it.

Shame on the denialists.