Debaters Behaving Badly, Part 2 - Using Scales to Hide the Incline
In Part 1 of this series on debaters behaving badly, we saw how some debaters behave badly by misusing short-term trends to claim that global warming has paused, leading to the proliferation of what I consider faux pause claims on the internet and social media. Here in Part 2, I'd like to consider the next most popular tactic I see used frequently in climate debates - using dishonest scales to make false claims about global temperatures or the correlation between temperatures and carbon dioxide. Misusing Scale to "Hide the Incline" of Global Temperatures One of the largest repositories of bad debate behavior on the internet is on the Watts Up With That blog. Anthony Watts recently wrote a post complaining about accurate reporting of global temperature anomalies and decided to replace them with his substitute version , which you can find on a side bar of his blog whenever you visit. It looks like this: To do this, Watts replaced the baseline temperature value of the G...