Why has 'Appropriate' changed?

Last week I saw two images from NASA that troubled me greatly. One was a graph displaying the data on the temperature anomaly since 1880, from four different organizations with the comment "Some say scientists can't agree on Earth's temperature changes. Here's what "disagreement" looks like." Of course the comment wouldn't make sense if the four lines were not very near each other. The other image is one of a spinning disco ball with the comment "IT HASN'T BEEN "COOL" SINCE DISCO WAS POPULAR," and "The last time Earth was cooler than the modern average was 1976, according to NASA's global temperature record."

Naturally I expect many people to read the previous paragraph as me denying global warming, climate change, or whatever it's being called now. That is not at all the case. The reason these images trouble me is that NASA should not be making them. Well, the graph was fine, but not the commentary. It is purely an inflammatory statement and that is not appropriate for NASA or any other government administration to make! Personally I believe in smaller government, but I do recognize the importance and need for government supported research, but bias representations of research is completely inappropriate. Such organizations should exist purely to generate data for the benefit of the world. They should go ahead and make the graphs and provide information about them, but to tack on a sentiment that clearly colors the interpretation of the data is just wrong. The disco ball image should simply not exist.

Perhaps the worst part, but also the part that little can be done about, is the comments some people left about the graph. Basically anyone who questioned it was immediately flamed, even if the person made a valid point. For example, I saw one comment that pointed out that only four institutions had their data represented, and as more than four exist with such information, it is possible that they were cherry picked. (Data being made to fit the hypothesis.) Other commenters who would prefer to condemn than consider attacked the person, but not the point they were trying to make. They decided to take it as an attack on the institutions instead of an attack on the presentation. Another person who pointed out that ending the data at 1880 could be misleading as there is reason to believe there were higher temperatures in the past. (Perhaps not as high as now, but regardless, this graph fails to represent such information.)

Such vitriol is extremely disturbing, especially for someone who follows and critically considers such information as the graph presents. If you ever see the graph you should notice that there is no uncertainty information, which means we do not know the accuracy of the data collected. If you look at the units you'll also notice that the data never gets much farther than 0.5 °C, which is not terribly large and without error information, we don't know the significance of it either. Then, there is another point that can be made about the data itself. The temperature anomaly is simply the difference from the average temperature, which means, given the variability of temperatures, you are almost never going to have an anomaly of zero. Of course a trend of change is something you will notice, but the placement of the average is always dependent on the data included in the calculation. You only have a positive temperature anomaly if you include enough cold years in the data you average.

Basically what I'm getting at is that statistics can always be fudged and being critical of them is a good thing.

Also, one more thing worth pointing out is that the comment with the graph is almost a complete straw-man. Only the smallest minority of scientists believe temperatures have not risen, and it could even be no scientists disagree on that. The only disagreement is about why temperatures have risen. Some argue its mostly due to human activity while others argue it is due to other, unknown/poorly understood variables. Some people, apparently some at NASA, would rather distract from that and denigrate their intellectual opposition than allow a dialogue about that debate. That was supposed to be the purpose of universities and national laboratories; to enable such debates. Now they're being used to dictate.

What's the solution? Critical thought and curiosity. Don't be dictated to. Learn and decide for yourself because then, if you should ever enter a debate, at least you can defend your opinion, and not have to rely on demagoguery.