Daily Mail manipulates graph to suggest stagnant global warming | Hacker News Reader

Daily Mail manipulates graph to suggest stagnant global warming

sargasso.nl

28 pointsjaap_w57 comments

For readers outside the UK, it is worth knowing a little context about the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is a newspaper in the loosest sense of the word. It is essentially a propaganda rag, flattering its readership by provoking their emotions on topics such as women in the workplace (which is a bad thing and gives them cancer), women not in the workplace (which is a bad thing and gives them cancer), the causes of cancer [1], immigrants, taxes and house prices. Bizarrely, for a publication with such a high female readership, it's remarkably misogynistic.

Typical readers are middle-aged to the elderly, who do not like having their assumptions challenged and find catharsis in the simplicity of the world as presented by the Daily Mail. The phrase "Daily Mail reader" has become shorthand for someone demonstrating characteristics such as ignorance, extremely simple viewpoints on complex situations, and bigotry poorly veiled under spurious numerical data or contextless "factoids".

[1] http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

Here's some context for British papers from 25 years ago (Yes Minister. "Hacker" is the minister, not an actual hacker.)

Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

I don't have the figures to hand, but it's interesting to also note that while their print readership is as you described, their online readers are even more heavily female, and also much younger (average 25 to 35). I had their media pack not long ago, I'll see if I can dig it out.

This I did not know, but it doesn't surprise me. If you can tell me which sections these young females gravitate towards, that would be very helpful; do they go for the bitchy celebrity gossip (which is frequently noticeably harsher towards female celebrities)?

The Daily Mail is one of the few newspapers that treat their online and paper offerings as essentially two different products. The paper edition is aimed at an older market, as described, while the online edition is aimed at a younger market with a much heavier focus on lifestyle, celebrity and gossip stories and, I get the feeling, doesn't take itself as seriously.

As I remember it, it was to the 'Femail' section of the site primarily, but that also the who site had a female skew across all sections and age ranges - I wonder if the 'traditional' male reader is more likely to be a technophobe that his female counterpart?

I don't remember what the younger section did for the average earnings of the readership - but I remember that as a whole the household earnings of their readers is above the UK average.

Media Packs here: http://www.mailconnected.com/audience and http://www.mailconnected.co.uk/stats/media-packs

I wonder how much of that audience actually aligns with the Mail's political values. My partner goes there every day for laughs, but is so far to the left the stereotypical Mail reader would probably want her arrested for treason and deported ;-)

You could make similar claims about say The Guardian, or people who get their news from Reddit. Personally, I find the echo-chamber on the left to be far more worrying (Not to mention their constant condescending sneering, looking down on the "idiot" masses).

Look at Reddit at the moment.. endless discussion about how the only reason anyone could vote for Romney is "uneducated voters".

In this case, both graphs look completely stagnant. Perhaps The Daily Mail did choose their start date to tie the numbers up nicely. Maybe they even rounded the start and end figures so that they could claim the numbers are exactly the same. But whichever way you look at it, the graphs are stagnant.

You may not like the left leaning stance of the Guardian, which is fine.

To compare it, however, with The Daily Mail is a bit ridiculous.

I don't think so,

The Daily Mail generally likes to make you feel scared.

The Guardian generally likes to make you feel outraged.

They're just playing on different emotions to sell papers.

As regards quality, fact checking, bias, they're all very similar.

I couldn't agree with you more. I believe the ability to spot the error and bias in the one while being blind to that of the other is a good indicator of a person's own bias.

It seems obvious the chart starts in September so the reader can compare like to like. If the chart had started in January but ended with the most recent available month (September) that would dishonestly bias an endpoint comparison since January is almost always colder than September. So the article text might be misleading - not a rare event with newspaper articles on technical subjects - but the chart is fine.

I don't think that's quite fair. I see as much criticism of the Mail by right wing folk as left wing. The Times reader doesn't like the Mail much either in my experience.

The right comparison to the Mail on the left would be the Mirror I think - not the Guardian.

And context for the comment above: It is very common to sneer at Daily Mail readers as a way of demonstrating your own right-on, progressive credentials.

Daily Mail readers are largely right-wing, but that doesn't by definition make them wrong.

The Daily Mail, however, is often wrong and frequently guilty of the sins I list above. Demonstrably so.

Sometimes, we sneer at something not because it makes us look good (or, as you put it, to demonstrate "progressive credentials", and your assumption that I want to do that is insulting and ignorant, thank you very much), but because it genuinely is dross.

If you like, I can balance the equation by criticising the Guardian for its ridiculous adherence to leftist views despite the most ferocious evidence in its own pages, or we can do the Economist which suggests less regulation as the solution to almost any problem that exists.

Edit to respond to comment below: Of course it's doing something right. It's selling newspapers. It does it by, as I said, flattering its readership and presenting them emotional sensations that confirm their beliefs. That doesn't make it worthy or correct. It makes it admirable only in a "magnificent bastards" kind of way. They know what they're doing and they do it very well.

Lots of papers print stories that are demonstrably wrong, though. And the Mail does cater to the lowest common denominator sometimes, but then that is the business of being a tabloid.

And it is one of the most popular tabloids in Britain, and one of the most popular websites in the world, so I would suggest that it is doing something right.

Depends what "right" is. They can certainly sell a lot of papers, no doubt. But do they help make create an informed electorate? Which is the most important function of a free press.

The biggest problem I have with the Mail is not whether it is biased or even that it makes mistakes.

My problem is more that they will often print a headline and first paragraph or a story that makes some claim that is often refuted in the article itself. I feel that this is intended to deliberately mislead those with lower critical thinking abilities.

It's amazing the number of times I've had to correct people on stuff like the legal status of Sharia courts. Of course I can't blame the mail for all of this stuff, there are plenty of other papers and blogs doing the same thing but the mail seems to be the flagship for this sort of journalism.

I'd love an informed electorate, but it would be a very tricky thing to try and define whether a particular story is informing the electorate or not, and to whose definition.

> I feel that this is intended to deliberately mislead those who don't read the entire article.

Fixed that for you.

Keep in mind that "reading only the headlines" is a common speed-up-your-life piece of advice. Tim Ferriss, for instance, specifically advises this. It's not really the readership's fault that the Mail is exploiting this.

No, but it is the paper's fault.

In a sentence, what they are doing right and wrong is selling entertainment as news.

I'm definitely leftist politically, but I make an active effort to consider alternative points of view. I read center-right newspapers (usually the Times, occasionally the Telegraph) because I don't like existing in an echo chamber - and I feel like it's far easier to be manipulated if you're reading a news source whose viewpoint you usually agree with.

While I often disagree with these newspapers, I still generally respect them - election time excluded, where many papers lose their sense of virtue. I respect them because they respect me enough to limit their attempts to use my emotions against me.

This is not the case for the Daily Mail. An example (one of many) that crystallised this for me, from way back in my youth:

Europe's switch to the Euro was underway, and the time to switch to euros in cash machines/as public currency. The Daily Mail, being very anti-Euro, had to paint this as a dismal failure. It weighed heavily on the fact that people were having to queue to get their new notes. It then followed up with a passage along the lines of 'At [some square in Germany], where Hitler's troops once marched, people queued around street corners to access the new currency'

Now, I get it. They didn't like the Euro. Quite sensibly, in fact - conservatives in the UK deserve a fair bit of praise for keeping us out of that mess. This doesn't make the quoted passage an acceptable means of delivering news, though.

I'm not sneering at the Daily Mail because it is right wing, but because its writing style is that of a manipulative propaganda rag. Personally, I think propaganda rags deserve sneering at.

    'At [some square in Germany], where Hitler's troops once marched, people queued around street corners to access the new currency'

Given their (ancient) history of supporting fascism, there's a small part of me that wonders what tone of voice that was actually written in.

I don't know if it's as simple as a left vs right wing thing. The telegraph for example is relatively right wing and does not seem to attract the same sort of ire.

Your comment is confusing. The Daily Mail IS right wing. That said, the Telegraph relies much less on emotional response and raw propaganda, and also does not seem to dedicate a vast amount of its time (almost as much as the Express does on house prices) to dividing the universe into things that cause or cure cancer (or sometimes both). I couldn't care less what the Mail's political leaning is; its a style thing rather than a (lack of) content thing.

That is true, but then the Daily Mirror is a left-wing tabloid and doesn't get so much opprobrium, even though (as the news today tells us) they were also guilty of phone-hacking.

But nobody reads it (relative to the Daily Mail and The Sun) and it just doesn't seem to matter in terms of the political debate. That is why it doesn't get so much opprobrium - it just doesn't matter.

The Daily Mail and The Sun can mount massive campaigns, ruin careers of politicians and swing large amounts of votes (or at least that is the perception). All the Mirror readers vote Labour whatever they say (not necessarily true but perception amongst politicians).

August readership - Daily Mirror 1.1M, Daily Mail 1.9M, Sun 2.5M Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/table/2012/sep/20/abcs-natio...

It's not the right wing thing so much (though that is a factor), it's more their hypocritical social conservatism mixed with over-sexualisation of anything they can spin a coin from.

Heck! That’s around forty million ignorant bigots including myself! The Daily Mail has the second largest English language readership worldwide, a figure which must contribute to a pessimistic view of humanity for bien pesant like yourself.

You must read this rag pretty regularly to have such a commanding view of its misogynistic bigoted views though I am quite sure you avert your eyes from the soft porn pictures of women on beaches. I am not up to managing that, yet.

By the way, your powers of generalization are impressive. Any chance of a few links to the painstakingly gathered statistics that,no doubt overwhelmingly support your searing analysis.

Thanks for your view. It's more or less what I hear from everyone who doesn't like that I consider their favoured newspaper to be imperfect.

I do check it frequently, yes. I do note that it continues to be dross. The soft porn is exactly as expected; just enough to satisfy its target audience without having to cross the line into actual porn like The Sun or similar, enabling Mail readers to feel good about themselves. I don't avert my eyes from it. I like looking at attractive women, although when I want porn, I just go to the internet. Why the hell would I avert my eyes? The obscenities in the Mail are in the written text; not the pictures.

"Any chance of a few links to the painstakingly gathered statistics that,no doubt overwhelmingly support your searing analysis." I think you're being facetious, so no, do your own research. There is lots and lots out there. Start with (the sadly no longer maintained) DailyMailWatch and go from there. What I've said isn't new. Please either say what you mean (which is at least something the Mail manages to do) or take your passive-aggressive nonsense somewhere else. You read the Mail? Then you know what I've said is true, unless actually you only read the mail and you just don't realise, in which case you've got a sample-size of one and anything you say about the subject is hopelessly ill-informed.

Let's not forget the paper's fascist past - "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" - http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/dictionary/dict_h1.php#hurra...

So was the Daily Mirror.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/dec/06/daily...

And I'm sure you can find articles in the Guardian supporting Soviet Russia.

I don't read the Mirror either. Though I find it hard to believe that the Guardian supported the Soviet Union.

Um, the real graph looks just as stagnant as the Daily Mail one.

The difference between them is barely even there.

Is anyone actually looking at the graphs on the blog, or are you just reading the title?

This. Very odd.

The real problem is that they are showing a tiny period of time. Global warming levels out a bit now and then and then keeps on going. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly... around 1965-1975 it didn't really go up much. And a graph of 1935-1945 might make you think we'd conquered global warming forever and that we could all get on with building the global socialist utopia or whatever. Sadly long term trends in complex systems aren't nearly that easy to form conclusions about.

Yes. Although it wouldn't surprise me that the Daily Mail altered the figures, it doesn't change much of anything to the overall shape of the graph. Therefore it's probably safe to attribute to stupidity rather than malice.

The article is absolutely missing the point.

Did you read the first couple of links in the article? On the day the original publication from DM came, we already debunked it, pointing to the longer time period: http://sargasso.nl/tweespalt-opwarming-plateau-of-niet/ (in Dutch sorry).

And we refer to others who did similar things.

But this specific article is about adjusting the data before presenting it. The first point (missing 8 months) is "understandable". The second point, changing the data at the beginning and end of the graph, is lying on purpose. That's unacceptable. Even though these are small adjustments (about 0,03 degrees), they are done in purpose and to reach a goal (make more people doubt).

I must confess I did not (especially as I don't read Dutch). But I still fail to see how a change of 0.03 degree should be a deliberate attempt at misleading people. I assume that the Daily Mail staff, while not necessarily embarassed by ethics, have at least a modicum of common sense.

It's done at both side of the graph, so it makes 0.06 :-) But that's not the point. It's the principle. If you present a graph based on actual data (verified by many scientist) and you change the data however slightly to fit your point of view, that's malice. Why do it otherwise?

Maybe not enough for this though: http://www.pcc.org.uk/cases/adjudicated.html?article=Nzg5Nw=...

I think what people miss is the fact that many scientists considered a 16 year lull in warming as very unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. It doesn't mean they have it all wrong or that it's just a hoax, and says nothing about the long term trend, but it does mean that they have to probably evolve their models and predictions to cater for natural short term variability better.

I find it very entertaining these accusations of cherry picking data for a cause, and then get countered with a different shape of cherry picking. For example proving a trend by using only land based surface temperatures, or only the past 30 years, or only the Northern Hemisphere, or neglecting the warming periods over the past 2000 years, or excluding the uncertainties of past reconstructions. It's a highly polarised debate so there is a lot of bias on both sides of the argument.

DM left out the first 8 months of 1997. Intuitively, it's fair that January is colder than September, but HADCRUT4 is temperature anomalies, so that's probably what went wrong.

That said, I think the article cherrypicks some (it seems to me) very minor issues, adds in an appeal to their own authority, while neglecting to explain why the conclusion that there "was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures [in the last 16 years]" is wrong. You can cherrypick any value within one year of the beginning and end of the graph that will show anywhere between ~0.3° rise and ~5.5° fall.

The 1997 slopes are repeated at 3 other times in the graph. Cutting them out makes little difference to the overall conclusion which is that this graph shows random variation and no long term trend.

If the blog author wanted to make some kind of point he should have included MUCH longer graphs, not just half a year.

> If the blog author wanted to make some kind of point he should have included MUCH longer graphs, not just half a year.

They do, in the "looked like" link of the second paragraph (http://sargasso.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hadcrut4_a.jpg). But that doesn't change the fact that they're beating on DM for misrepresenting the data, rather than making the argument that 16 years to too short.

You're missing the point: The graph is the same for the period of time which the editor selected. But he carefully selected the left (past) cutoff point to be on the same level as the right cutoff point. But in the original data, there's a steep incline at the beginning of the graph.

Now I can't vouch for the data or that the original data doesn't have a steep drop-off just a little before the snippet we're shown, but this is a prime example how choosing the sample properly changes the result dramatically.

That "steep incline at the beginning of the graph" isn't big enough, or over a large amount of time to be worth caring about.

Look at the charts. They're stagnant.

You're missing my point. I trust neither of the two - all I say is that given the numbers you can always choose a timeframe that supports your theory better than the opponents theory. So be wary of the numbers.

But the UK Met Office agrees with the Mail article author.

'We agree with Mr Rose that there has been only a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century. As stated in our response, this is 0.05 degrees Celsius since 1997 equivalent to 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade.'

And they correctly note -

'However, we do suggest that measurements over the longer-term are more representative of the trend in climate due to the influence of natural variability over shorter timescales.'

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-...

Man made global warming is a PR invention carefully engineered to create more taxation, trading profits in 'indulgences', and to revive the public support for the nuclear industry.

Even if they persuaded you, you got to admit that these three things are the main tangible results and that they are happening.

The support for the nuclear industry was seriously flagging exactly at the time when the 'global warming' suddenly started getting pushed by certain prominent VIPs and the main stream media. Now many new nuclear reactors are planned, despite Fukushima. This would never have been accepted before 'global warming'.

If you are not convinced, look for example into the background of Sir John Bebbington (made into the UK's chief scientific advisor) and his pronouncements on Fukushima: 'No question, absolutely no danger whatsoever. No comparison with Chernobyl.... etc.'. Made at the time when the reactors were exploding and melting, one after another.

0.03 C per decade means that this trend would have to continue unbroken for a thousand years to achieve a noticeable warming of 3C. Use your common sense, please?

Yes, I mean the global scientific consensus and the historical data showing a constant climb is in reality a matter of using common sense correctly, and has nothing to do with the underlying matter being far too complex for a PHD thesis or 1 line correlations between single individuals.

Its tiring to have to go through old posts and historical data to tease apart the points and show why scientists in the field of weather and climate have reached a consensus that climate change is real.

As for you particular assertion that its a PR push - please realize that flagging support for the nuclear industry amongst the public at large remains and is largely independent of global warming fears.

I mean, we are pushing solar, wind and renewable power around the world more than we ever have, and a LOT more than nuclear.

Heck just look at the boom/bust in silicon prices a while back, the constant efforts to reach grid parity through silicon, and the massive solar farms that are being put up.

Why did you choose a quote from the comments rather than the more complete one from the article itself?

"The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming."

Because the quote in the comments is by the author of the article, expanding on what he said in the article?

I don't think it's any surprise that the Daily Mail has used its agenda to mislead its readers.

Not at all.

I sometimes feel that papers or news/media outlets that do this should end up getting fined huge amounts and made to run public apologies (full page or TV) because its such a dangerous topic to mislead people on. That said, its no surprise its coming from the Daily mail.

It depresses me that Apple have to do something like that over the Samsung lawsuit, but the newspapers can lie to our faces every day and get away with it. That said, I don't read newspapers anymore for this exact reason.

I wrote a program to plot temperature data a while ago, although it's from the GHCN rather than the HadCRUT4 data set.

https://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/

The square gridding method which they appear to have used in HadCRUT4 introduces problems with singularities, but even with a better gridding method the anomaly results are broadly in line with the conventional view about global warming.

It seems that there is not much difference between the gossip magazines and the newspapers any more.

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