{"id":114,"date":"2009-07-31T14:03:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T13:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/2009\/07\/31\/scaremongering-with-graphs\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T12:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T11:16:13","slug":"scaremongering-with-graphs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/2009\/07\/31\/scaremongering-with-graphs\/","title":{"rendered":"Scaremongering with graphs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Newspapers often enough publish graphs which give wrong impressions on what the numbers behind the diagram actually mean. The usual culprit is a y-axis which does not start with 0, thus visually inflating any trend\/changes in the data.<\/p>\n<p>This week I stumbled upon something else:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image113\" src=\"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/kleine_zeitung_klima.jpg\" alt=\"kleine zeitung diagram\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kleinezeitung.at\/nachrichten\/chronik\/2088331\/wenn-wetterkapriolen-zum-alltag-werden.story\">The article<\/a> was all about &#8220;Do we have to expect more extreme weather in the future thanks to global warming?&#8221;.  The expert they interviewed kind of rejected the premise that we can deduce anything from one year&#8217;s weather. But they wanted to have a scary graph in the article, so they came up with this one.<\/p>\n<p>So what&#8217;s wrong? If you compare the temperature and precipitation graphs of <strong>one year<\/strong> with the <strong>long-term averages<\/strong>, then it&#8217;s almost a given that the current year will look more extreme than the averages. <\/p>\n<p>The comparison might make sense if you argue that 2009 is colder\/warmer\/wetter\/dryer than the average year, but for comparing weather variance, this is completely worthless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Newspapers often enough publish graphs which give wrong impressions on what the numbers behind the diagram actually mean. The usual culprit is a y-axis which does not start with 0, thus visually inflating any trend\/changes in the data. This week I stumbled upon something else: The article was all about &#8220;Do we have to expect [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pet-peeves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":987,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lendl.priv.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}