Twice in one day

Twice in one day. In None of it bodes well for an informed public I commented on a patently untrue headline and article in the Washington Post, Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty by Lyndsey Layton.

I speculated how on earth it was possible for the author and editors to allow such a gross inaccuracy through the fact-checking process that presumably still exists. None of those speculations reflected well on the Washington Post.

Well, here's a second example in one day of a newspaper publishing a headline that is blatantly untrue.

This past Friday, NASA issued a press release prompting headlines galore proclaiming 2014 to have been the warmest year on record. I chose not to read any of the initial reports confident that they were simply rewrites of a press release. The claim of warmest year simply didn't make sense against anecdotal data. It has been a colder year than normal here in the US. From friends in Europe it sounded like it was average to cooler. Cooler in Australia by reports from friends there. Nothing out of the ordinary reported from friends in Asia. Only a couple of comments from friends in Africa and South America but again, I heard no one reporting anything out of the ordinary.

But casual comments are not robust data. However, the major institutions affiliated with climate data collection have been strong proponents of the global warming argument and at the same time have a lengthy track record of data manipulation, data suppression, and data misrepresentation. No point in investing time digging in such swampy ground. Better to wait and see what happens was my sentiment. In the age of internet news you have to allow a couple of days for data rich reports to get digested and critiqued.

Sure enough, two days later there are now widespread (though not as widespread as the initial press release) reports that in fact the confidence level in the claim that 2014 was the warmest on record is only 38% and that the effect size was miniscule. It is now reported that the recorded global average temperature increase for 2014 was 0.02 degrees celsius (and in which number they only have 38% confidence) and well within the margin of measurement error of 0.1 degree celsius. So basically we don't have any evidence at all that 2014 was warmer than recent years and our speculation that it might have been warmer has only a 38% probability of being accurate.

Two lies in one day. Is it any wonder that people are losing confidence and trust in institutions?

UPDATE: A good summary of the issues with the global warming headlines: The Most Dishonest Year on Record by Robert Tracinski