Unscrupulous climate graph

This post on A Few Things Ill Considered is a great demonstration of how graphs and statistics can be abused. Show CO2 and temperature data from a short stretch of time, with misleading axes, and you can produce the impression that they are unrelated. Present the information in a fair way, and the correlation between the two looks very plausible.

Combine that with the theoretical framework about greenhouse gases trapping energy (in the form of longwave radiation) within the planet system, and you have a hypothesis that is defensible on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023. View all posts by Milan