A picture can be worth a thousand words—especially if it’s deliberately designed to mislead and scare people, because of course so many think “seeing is believing.”

That’s why CAGW alarmists are so eager to show us pictures like this of the annual global surface temperature anomaly from 1850 to 2015:

That comes from the UK’s Met Office and shows (from three different data sources) the really frightening warming from about 1910 to about 1945 and the equally frightening warming from about 1980 to about 2015. Really frightening! As in, “Mommy, hold me! I wanna go home! Don’t let the monsters get me!” frightening.

But just when you think you have a real thriller going, some party pooper comes along and spoils the whole show by showing the data on a more realistic vertical scale—one that reflects normal daily temperature range, the normal range from warmest to coldest month, and the normal range of temperature extremes, all in Earth’s midlatitudes:

That’s from a recent article by Certified Consulting Meteorologist and Fellow of the American Meteorological Society Joseph D’Aleo, formerly a college professor and First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel,  author of books and papers on how natural factors drive seasonal weather and long-term climate trends.

Nope, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. That barely varying red line across the middle, where it’s nearly impossible to detect a trend? That’s basically the same information as in the three lines and error bars of the Met Office’s scary graphic.

Doggone it, Joe! Why’d you have to go and spoil the fun! You know everybody likes a good horror show! You’re such a killjoy!

 

 

Featured image “Frankenstein” courtesy of “Insomnia Cured Here,” Flickr Creative Commons.