Lies, Damned Lies and Carbon Dioxide

The US government says 2014 was the hottest year on record, and the fourth such record since 1997. Skeptics say global warming stopped 18 years ago. Who is full of it? The graph shows temperatures since 1950 with El Niños in red. (It does not include 2014, which was the warmest year yet, and not an El Niño.)

Both the government and skeptics are trying to mislead us.

The government is misleading us by citing record temperatures, because these only tell us that the world is not cooling. The world is not measurably warmer than it was 10 years ago even though we have had 3 record-setting years in that decade. They are not wrong about the world getting warmer, but they make some of the least important data points sound more important than than they are.

However, the skeptics are also trying to mislead us. 1998 was an anomalous El Nino. Instead of using all of the data to interpolate an actual trend, they cherry-picked one of many data points to fit a made up story The world didn't get warmer during the last 10 years, but it has warmed measurably since 18 years ago.

Global warming has slowed before, then picked up again. This chart shows how the 1998 El Niño barely affected the long term trend. The recent decade of no warming also looks less significant in context.

Cherry-picking does not just manipulate opinions (like the government's misleading vividness,) cherry-picking manipulates facts. In this case it tells a blatant lie (the world hasn't warmed over the last 18 years) to cast unwarranted doubt on an important and well-established scientific theory: that our greenhouse gas emissions are changing the global climate.

We should all be alarmed by these big changes to the environment which sustains our lives, and we should respect the integrity and expertise of the scientists who serve us and share our planet. We should also recognize that fossil fuels are being used to do good things (like the space program that data comes from,) and developing more sustainable energy will take time and money as well as good intentions and political will.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png
NOAA, January 2013, public domain

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, January 2013, public domain