I knew there was some solution to the competing claims about Alaskan temperatures. How could one body say that annual average temperatures had risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last thirty years and another say it’s merely 2.7 degrees? The answer lies in this chart. The number used by the Times and now the Washington Post is not the last thirty years. It’s based on a period between 1966 and 1995. By picking 1966 as the base-point, you can get that result. But 1966 is a freak year. It’s one of the four coldest years in Alaska this century. And 1995 was one of the hottest. The Times cherry-picked two data points and argued an average trend between the two of them – about as dishonest a piece of statistical fiddling as you’ll find. Perhaps the original 7 degree number was from an even more strained attempt to skew the data. If you pick 1956 and 1981, for example, you could argue an annual average temperature rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit! But if you’re an honest statistician, you’ll look at a seasonally corrected average. From that, you’ll find that the temperature has risen only about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the period cited by the Times. Notice the slyness of their correction:
A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees [my italics].
When you first read that, you tend to infer that they’re talking about the same time period. But they’re not! They’ve switched from “the last 30 years” to just “30 years.” They moved the goalposts. This is not impugn their sources, who have gone out of their way not to make the kind of sweeping claims the Times has done. In fact, the researchers the Times cite have just told the Anchorage Daily News that “the strongest warming trend has shifted from Alaska into Northern Canada and the warming trend for most of Alaska … is now about half of the 1966-1995 value, or about 2-3 degrees F.” Say after me: all the news that’s easy to distort.
POSEUR ALERT: “If there’s anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it’s baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry-management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing-and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game-some would say a ritual-of hope.” – John Lahr, The New Yorker.
The Dish 