Not willful deception but innumeracy

From The Only Global Warming Chart You Need From Now On by Steven Hayward.

Axis compression is one of the standard techniques of statistical deception. The scientific underpinnings of global warming remain very much debated, despite the unscientific claims of consensus. We are still at the very early stages of even beginning to understand what we don't understand in terms of climate forecasting. Could global warming be real and a real problem? Certainly. We just don't have much understanding of it at this point in time.

What we have had, going back to the first IPCC reports, is a solid track record of deceit and deception ranging from the East Anglia model fiasco in the early days, through Mann's Hockey Stick manipulation, including the covert efforts to suppress contra evidence from reaching publication all the way to the present with continuing efforts to manipulate raw data before it even hits the models.

There is more than enough grounds to be sensibly skeptical of the self-serving claims of those who will be the primary beneficiaries of anything that is chosen to be done by government about climate.

Hayward points out an additional practice of deception which I had always taken into account but hadn't ever quite visualized. Read his article for the background.

Whatever your cause might be, one of the oldest communication tricks in the book is to manipulate the vertical scale and horizontal scales in order to magnify the visual magnitude of the effect. Crime, climate, poverty, left-handedness, traffic accidents. Whatever you want to generate concern about, you can do so by compressing the vertical scale and strategically selecting the time horizon, particularly regarding the starting point. All complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems have a lot of noise with material swings above and below whatever the trend line might be. If you want to show a fall, you measure from whichever year was the high point. If you want to show a rise, pick the most recent year that had the lowest number.

This is what bandwagon climatologists have been doing since the beginning but I hadn't particularly considered just how dramatic the visual difference is. While demonstrating the scare-climatologists manipulation of scales, Hayward actually commits the same sin in his last graph, choosing a scale that overemphasizes the minuteness of temperature change. But his underlying point is a good one. When you see people consistently choosing to display data in deceptive ways, it warrants asking what their real end-goal might be.

From Hayward's article, here is how recent global temperature change is usually presented. Note the compressed vertical scale ranging from 56-59 degrees in order to exaggerate the degree of temperature change.

Click to enlarge.

Usually, you would display data on a vertical access either from 0-100 or, as Hayward does, the observed range of maximum and minimum temperatures. Here's what global warming looks like with a normal scale.

Click to enlarge.

If you were conspiracy minded, you would assume that this standard good data visualization practice is not observed by the media because they are in cahoots with some cabal of big government climate change alarmists. While that might be a logical position to take, I am pretty certain that is not the case. Journalistic innumeracy and incapacity to handle numbers and data display are so comprehensive and widespread that this instance does not stand out as an exception. I think Ockham's Razor suggests simple innumeracy rather than willful deception or cupidity.