With 2014 now in the books, it’s a good time to refresh our memories about the great conservative global warming hoax. Here’s a look at the usual conservative presentation showing that the planet hasn’t warmed even a teensy little bit over the past decade. Their go-to chart, which goes from 1998 through 2012, looks like this:
No warming! But how can that be? Well, if you cherry pick your start and end dates, you can show just about anything. Here’s the same chart extended by a mere two years on either side. It goes from 1996 through 2014:
Warming! How about that? It’s amazing how you can lie with numbers if you put your mind to to it. And here’s the full chart since 1900:
This is apropos because NASA announced today that we set a record last year: “The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists.”
The year 1998 was an outlier, an unusually warm year. If you choose this as your starting point, the next decade will look pretty uneventful. You can do the same thing with lots of other decade-long periods. For example, 1969-85 looks pretty flat, and so does 1981-94. This is typical of noisy data. Planetary warming isn’t a smooth upward curve every year. It spikes up and down, and that allows people to play games with the data over short periods. Add to that the fact that warming really does appear to pause a bit now and again, and it’s easy for charlatans to fool the rubes with misleading charts.
But in the end, physics and chemistry will do their thing regardless. Earth is warming up, as any honest look at the data makes clear. And 2014 is now yet another record-setting year. We’ll see if that’s enough to embarrass the Fox News set into giving up on the old 1998 chestnut.
