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Lying with Statistics — An Art Form

Hottest month on record — the streak continues

Some months ago, we made the observation that every month this year through April has been [link url=”http://edmdigest.com/adaptation/anyone-looking-forward-to-summer/” title=”the hottest of that month ever recorded”].

So it’s without much pleasure that this can be updated with, well, with more of the same. This streak not only has extended through June, but is an ongoing trend that [link url=”http://www.noaa.gov/june-marks-14-consecutive-months-record-heat-globe” title=”has extended now for 14 consecutive months”].

Why oh why do we deny?

Denial of what’s going on is puzzling as a phenomenon. It has proceeded through several phases.

  • First, deniers first banked on the hope that [link url=”http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/” title=”the evidence could be hidden”] until it went away.
  • Then, the fossil fuel industry spent untold millions with the express purpose of [link url=”http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/07/The-Climate-Deception-Dossiers.pdf” title=”creating doubt about the science”].
  • Then, politicians were recruited (and funded) to [link url=”https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Hoax-Warming-Conspiracy-Threatens/dp/1936488493″ title=”further create obstacles”] to meaningful action. Ultimately, an entire political party and its political platform embraced the concept of climate change denial.

There was just one problem with all that. It continued getting hotter. And hotter.

And hotter.

Here’s how to represent the facts.

I call your attention to the graph above:

Sit back and absorb what this graph is telling you. My takeaway is that it’s basically telling us two things on the macro level:

  • Up until around 1910, the earth was in a global cooling trend. Other graphs will show that the cooling trend extends back around 11,000 years.
  • In 1910, concurrent with the opening of the first coal-fired industrial plants, and widespread automobile usage, the cooling trend has been completely reversed and a global warming trend has been in effect ever since.

And it is saying one extremely important thing on the micro level:

Check out the last three black dots on the right of the graph. Those dots represent an explosiveness in warming that has taken the earth’s temperature to new highs. Those dots explain why we are talking about 14 consecutive months that are the hottest in human history.

Time to apply creativity.

So the deniers — persistent as they are — have gone to great lengths to apply creativity to the interpretation of the data. If you look at the period from around 1998 to 2012, for example, you can see that it’s possible to draw a flat line through those points, as if global warming were not happening. Deniers jumped all over this.

Fox News in particular added this flatline graph section to its [link url=”http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/12/31/10-dumbest-things-fox-said-about-climate-change/191859″ title=”litany of irrelevant possible causes and misinformation”] that they use to do everything and anything to avoid accepting responsibility for humankind’s contribution to global warming.

Senator Ted Cruz held a hearing in which he attempted to assert that [link url=”http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/12/ted-cruz-climate-change-pause” title=”there hasn’t been any global warming for the past 18 years”].

If one were to take a micro look at favored sections of the graph and discard the complex factors that contribute to warming and cooling in the short term, such as the El Nino, then that may be correct.

But it’s also irrelevant.

A deadly game.

Why is it irrelevant? Because it’s hot outside. It’s hotter outside right now than it has been in human history. At this moment, 180 million of our citizens are under an [link url=”https://amuedge.com/white-house-warns-to-prepare-for-extreme-heat/” title=”excessive heat warning”]. This situation is so dangerous that the President has weighed in with an effort to keep folks safe — and alive, for that matter.

So make no mistake, the folks that are lying to you about whether or not this is happening at all, that are lying to you about human impact, that are dismissing the importance of this issue from an EDM perspective — these people are threatening the lives, health, and safety of you, your families, and your served public. And they don’t appear to care.

So it’s up to you to tell them to shut up until they’re willing to do no harm. Good luck.

Learn more:

[relink url=”https://amuedge.com/going-it-alone-on-climate/” url2=”http://edmdigest.com/adaptation/climate-change-in-metaphor-revisited/” url3=”https://amuedge.com/hundreds-of-2003-heat-wave-deaths-linked-to-climate-change/”]

[relink url=”https://amuedge.com/noaa-a-hot-summer-is-forthcoming/” url2=”https://amuedge.com/noaa-says-may-of-2016-hottest-on-record-for-the-globe/” url3=”https://amuedge.com/white-house-warns-to-prepare-for-extreme-heat/”]

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