Random Thoughts About Global Warming

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Would it have been better to print the entire raw data (again, going past the one-liner, that's exactly what his colleagues replied to him with)? Perhaps. But boy do I understand where the dude is coming from. When facing people who walk outside in January and say, "Look, it's 32 degrees today, take THAT global warming!!!" I can appreciate the urge to avoid printing a graph that might, to people who don't have a grasp of statistics, appear to show a downward trend in temperatures.

Sigh, sometimes I hate being right.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

This is why weaker-willed people have the urge to pretty-up the data. Even 100% conclusive data showing global warming WILL have bits that, read by someone who doesn't grasp the concept of statistical trends, "contradict" the conclusion. So it's tempting to look at it and say, "I know that the entire data set supports my conclusion, but people without the analytical training I have are going to misinterpret the full data set, so why don't I just tailor the data I publish so that to the untrained eye it matches the conclusion which I know to be right."

Again, it's a bad decision to make. The doffuses who succumbed to this temptation were correctly called out for it. But if you have to continually start each conversation by contradicting idiots that think a snow storm negates global warming, you'd start to really really wish the snow storms would stop.