Like a fat, sweaty, old Elvis impersonator, Steve Milloy, longtime tobacco and climate denial shill, keeps dusting off the oldies of climate denial. He did it again last night, and got a “Community notice” on Twitter/X, which pointed to the actual, contextually longer NOAA graph.
(you have to be pretty gross to get noticed on Twitter these days)
This cherry picking of graphs technique is one of the oldest scams in the book, but like Fat Elvis playing his hits, he still has an adoring audience.
Below, a closer look at how it works (and whose tried it before? you’ll never guess..).
The link to the real graph takes you to Milloy’s fake graph
I, too, tried clicking on that blue highlighted “link” but it turns out you’re clicking on the whole Twitter (“X”) insert, not just that colored text, so it brings you to Milloy’s post.
Milloy didn’t even bother computing a trend line. He just drew a line from a high point on the left edge to a low point on the right edge. A least squares line would not have looked that way.
(Also note that Milloy’s chart uses different data than the one posted beneath it. Milloy has 1-Year Nov-Oct numbers, the other has 10 month Jan-Oct.)