Climate change deniers argue that the world is cooling
How they use faulty statistics to uphold lies about the ongoing crisis
I recently saw a post on twitter called “The staircase of denial”.
The basic premise is that you constantly see claims that the world has been cooling over the last 8 years or for a period of 10 years when it was supposed to be warming.
Typically, these strings of cooling are chosen very carefully to start with a hot year and end on a cooler year. If you draw a sequence of such trends over several decades, you see what looks like a staircase. The overall trend is very clear: up, up, and up some more.
This is just one way to lie with statistics which brings to mind the three types of lies, according to Mark Twain, lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Skeptical science put together a similar graphic which you can find here.
This particular crime against truth is called cherry-picking because climate deniers are picking the years to look at instead of the overall trend.
Each year different factors like El Niño and La Niña determine the global average temperature. You find patterns of stability or even cooling within the overall upward trend.
