In the early 1990s, working partly as a freelance book editor, I had the privilege of being the main managing editor of Julian L. Simon’s (edited) The State of Humanity (Blackwell, 1995). One of my responsibilities was turning raw data from the book’s 60 authors into graphs so people could grasp them better. But the graphs could enhance understanding only if they handled the data objectively, and one of the things Julian drummed into me was that whenever possible a graph should have a zero baseline or, if graphing percentage, a 100-point spread, for its Y-axis (perpendicular). (Another was that the data should go back as far as possible while maintaining true data comparability.)

That lesson has come to mind literally hundreds of times when I’ve seen graphs of changes in “global average temperature.”

Sometimes they’re graphs of actual degrees, but they tend to go from about 50˚ F to about 60˚ F, while natural atmospheric temperatures on earth run from about -70˚ to about 140˚, which means the graphs exclude about 95 percent of the range, focusing in on a narrow band that’s representative of essentially nowhere on earth. Other times, they’re graphs of “temperature anomalies,” divergence of measured temperature from an average, and those tend to get drawn with an even shorter Y-axis, typically totaling only about 5˚ or 6˚, often as little as 2˚.

In either case, they magnify apparent differences enormously. The result is hugely misleading, as physicist/chemist Dr. C.R. Dickson aptly explains in a recent article that every citizen or elected official subject to global warming propaganda should read.

To illustrate, consider this photo, provided by Dickson:

What is that? The surface of the moon? Maybe some brain coral?

No, it’s a little bit of the surface of this glass plate, but magnified:

As Dickson points out, “the magnified view has numerous peaks and valleys making the surface look rough, not smooth. Although the imperfections seem larger in the magnified view, they are the same size as in the normal view.”

Ditto the kinds of temperature and temperature-anomaly graphs routinely offered up by global warming alarmists. As Dickson points out, these two graphs depict the same data:

Even the one on the left is significantly magnified since it covers only a 60-degree span compared with the 210-degree span of natural atmospheric temperatures, but it’s still far less alarming than the one on the right, which shrinks the span to about 2 degrees.

As Dickson writes, “Fortunately, people normally do not use a magnified version of the world to proceed with their daily lives. That’s why no one drives down a highway guided by a microscope magnifying the road’s surface. For the same reason, weather forecasters use the real temperatures instead of magnified temperature anomalies.”

But global warming alarmists know they could never generate alarm with objective graphs like the one on the left, so they constantly use magnified graphs like the one on the right. The result is a hugely misleading view of what’s happening with temperatures on the earth.

Perhaps the alarmists have a point and there’s a reason to consider the changes, even though they’re so small, and so there’s a reason to magnify them enough for people to perceive them. But to be really honest, they should always graph their temperature data in two ways, side-by-side: objectively (preferably with Y-axis running from about -70˚ to about 140˚ F, which is about the full range of natural atmospheric temperature on earth) and magnified, so viewers have some sense of the proportions being depicted.

 

 

Featured image by Adrian Sampson from Flickr.com Creative Commons.