Now the deniers are questioning the usefulness of graphs, what is left for them?

Question

I gave an answer to a question from Bob earlier today and mentioned that Jello only post tables of data and not graphs. When confronted, Jello states that graphs can be manipulated. Sure they could, but so can tables. So why use any of it? But we have to use something in science and the reason that we plot data is so that we can more easily observe trends or behavior of the data. They are used to understand the behavior of systems, to visualize large sets of data and to help understand many important systems that might not be as easy to understand just by looking at a bunch of numbers. Graphs are a way of making scores of data points manageable and, often, more understandable. Simple as that.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AnaW.oJVfGWm7ahXGrhQw5jsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080404065317AATZHhd&show=7#profile-info-7a1a4586cbdfad0a780847164818434aaa

He really has no reasonable argument.

Should we add "graphs can be manipulated" to other denier arguments such as...

Answer 1

Yes, and where it concerns Jello, remember that here's a guy who recently said that the ice shelf breaking off antarctica was evidence against AGW because if AGW were true the temperature would be increasing equally over the globe and not more at the poles. All this even though GW scientists predicted the poles would be effected more. How does anyone take him seriously?

Answer 2

"We are not a greenhouse gas" is my current favorite.

DJ likes tables because it is harder to see trends in a column of numbers, especially if the data is noisy.  The idea is that if objective reality isn't agreeing with what you want to believe, obfuscate.

Answer 3

Another fairly frequent denier argument is to use the Mark Twain quote "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Linking a table of values alone is almost useless.  You can't eyeball a colum full of over 100 values and extract anything meaningful from it.  That's why we have graphs!

Yes, graphs and statistics can be used deceptively, but it's not that hard to figure out if that's the case.  For example, when you've got a simple graph like the NASA GISS temperature data, which simply plots the raw points and then a 5-year running mean, there's obviously nothing deceptive about it.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

Or another of my favorite examples is the Tamino graph which plots raw data from NASA and Hadley over various periods (for example, since 1998) then applies a simple linear best fit.

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/0...

If Tamino wanted to be deceptive, he could have narrowed the y-axis to make the trends look bigger, but that's about it.  Again it's a simple plot with few options for deceit.

On the other hand, when you link a huge table of numbers and say "see, this proves the planet has stopped warming", *that* is deceptive.  You're relying on the fact that almost nobody can conclude anything from looking at a massive table of numbers, and that they'll take your word for it when you say 'this is what it shows'.

In fact, most of the deceptive graphs I see come from the AGW denial movement.  For example, surfacestations.org has several of them:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/s...

And Anthony Watts' website is absolutely full of misleading graphs and statistics.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/?s=watts+up+...

In short, just because graphs and statistics *can* be deceptive doesn't mean they *are* deceptive.  It reminds me of the denier tactic to disregard all Wikipedia links because they *can* be tampered with, even though most are accurate and contain links to the source documents at the bottom of the page.

Answer 4

For some reason, lots of people have graphs with different measurements of CO2 and temperature in the same time period. I don't know which one to trust. The people making money or the people who are not making money.

Answer 5

This winter has been the coldest in the last 100 years.  What does that do to your graphs?

Answer 6

What's left? Snow, ice, blizxzards, frigid temperatures lasting months, highway carnage, broken bones, crippled seniors, higher oil costs, "worst winter for homeless", my own recollections of how it used to be as cold and how we blamed it on the Russians (now we blame America).

I didn't insult you. I don't get my talking points from my Hollywood heaththrob. Is this how the chicken littles of the world prove they are smarter than real climate scientists?

Seriously?

Answer 7

When you take away computer models from alarmists, they have absolutely nothing to stand on and computer models are easily manipulated to get whatever outcome the biases of the programmer expects and typically don't reveal that information that is guessed at or not known.

Answer 8

i love graphs. the trick is to decide which are the reputable sources, as with all other data.

i laughed my socks off the other day, followed a few 'denyer' links back past the graphs to some very strange places.....

perhaps the good 'doctor' has realised someone will do this to his.....