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Climate change

Climate change is a pretty popular topic and is often misrepresented or construed to fit the biased of the author. To the untrained eye this graph can look accurate, however, once you dive deeper into it a lot of problems arise.  This ad supposedly came from the National Climatic Data center and is claiming 2012 has been the hottest year on record. First of all lets talk about the x-axis, that is not even labeled and the years have no order to them. The y-axis is not labeled as well and offers no units of measurements. Is it Fahrenheit? Celsius? Kelvin? No one knows and we can only assume it might be Fahrenheit because the graph insinuates this data is from the U.S. Also why does this only include U.S. data? Now are we the only ones experiencing climate change? In this graph it is also clear to see the authors viewpoint by skewing data in that direction and making the data for the year of 2012 red and appear significantly larger than the rest.With climate change being a pretty major issue today and having a lot of people on different sides it is easy to be fooled by a uninformative and misleading graph. 
source: http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/how-2012-stacks-up-the-worst-graph-on-record/
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
I actually screen shoot this off the NASA website, if it is hard to read I recommend zooming in but I will also provide the link.  NASA is a pretty great and reliable source and offers a lot of information neatly. The first graph  represents  1993 to present but they also provide earlier data on rising sea levels in the second graph. NASA provides how the data is collected ,where, and gives credit, they also provide measurements for each day if you hover your mouse over it (It wont work in the blog so you'll have to go to the site)  It clearly labels its axis's and provides units. They also offer the rate of change per year.  I would really recommend considering your sources for all graphs, especially for a topic like climate change. There is so much information out there and it is very important to weed through it and find the unbiased and accurate data.   

Comments

  1. Amber StricklandFebruary 21, 2018 at 3:47 PM

    Hey Madilyn! I agree with you that you have to check your sources in order to verify that the graphs are accurate. You have to look at the data in great detail to make sure it is correct.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Science SlapFebruary 23, 2018 at 5:56 PM

    The first graph is very misleading, I looked at it and thought it was somewhat accurate until I saw that the years were out of order. But I think the only reason that the report was on U.S. climate change instead of global is because the people who made the graph could not get many outside sources in order to have a reliable graph. It is extremely biased though. Good post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marta ToranMarch 5, 2018 at 4:19 PM

    Great discussion and well laid out post Madilyn! The ironic thing about the graph above, and I agree with everything you say, is that it's actually from a reliable website (Climate Central) and based on good data from the National Climate Data Center. It's a shame that they wanted to make it more dramatic/ sensational and they made it hokier instead. Make sure you are more specific about the graph/ diagram you are referring to. For this, it's better to label them each with "Figure 1," "Figure 2," etc. In the text, refer to them as such with phrases such as: "As seen in Figure 1..." or "Turning our attention to Figure 2, which illustrates..." etc.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Al PalApril 30, 2018 at 2:37 PM

    Really good graphs! Clearly lays out good examples of both sides of the coin.

    ReplyDelete

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