The Politics of Data

Going Down the Up Escalator is an interesting post discussing the politics of separating signal from noise in climate change data. As the post notes:

There are also a number of effects which can have a large impact on short-term temperatures, such as oceanic cycles like the El Niño Southern Oscillation or the 11-year solar cycle.  Sometimes these dampen global warming, and sometimes they amplify it.  However, they're called "oscillations" and "cycles" for a reason - they alternate between positive and negative states and don't have long-term effects on the Earth's temperature.

Thus, by selectively picking the range of data, it is possible to argue that the temperature is cooling rather than warming (as shown in the graphs below).