I don't watch television, but I take visual samples when I walk by one, just to see what the latest focus is on. Except for the initial keening over the "Obama Chef" who drowned (before the whole thing was dropped down the memory hole) the laser focus appears to be nearly universal hysteria that we are in a killer heat wave that is the direct result of global warming.
There was an article I saw last week that looked at this graph which appeared to show that extreme heat and extreme cold caused, overall, roughly the same kind of fatality rates. At first blush, one might think...why publish this? It appears to show that warm-weather deaths are approaching cold weather deaths is my guess.
But there is something odd about this graph, isn't there? Do you see it? (I didn't when I first looked at it). Look at the left side of the graph (deaths due to cold weather) and examine the scale at the bottom. Then, look at the scale on the right side (deaths due to hot weather).
They are completely different scales. The "heat-death related scale" on the right displays "Excess Death Rate (per 100,000 person-years) on a scale of 0 to 40.
But when you look at the Left side, the "cold-death related scale" has an scale of 0 to 250. They even truncate the hot weather death scale on the right at 40, put in a couple of slashes to denote continuity, and end the scale at 250.
Why would they do that? It has been long known that cold weather is much harsher towards human life than hot weather, mostly due to common sense factors. Here is the same graph with a corrected scale:
What the data really shows is that cold weather kills ten times as many people as hot weather. But, in the deliberate attempt to mislead and incite hysteria, they attempted to make it look as if both hot and cold weather were just as deadly, and that is due to recent "changes in climate" ie....global warming.
Why would they do that, indeed? Because they are dishonest. That wasn't a mistake. It was fully intentional to mislead. The slashes at the right side of the scale was put there to make both sides APPEAR to be exactly the same scale, and it makes the dimensions of both the left and right side exactly the same size visually. It is a deliberate fraud.
This is endemic. And it is the reason thinking people reject the "Climate Change" narrative being pushed. If the statistics were real and honest, it would be different.
For me, I was trying to keep an open mind, until I looked at an article about the famous climate model developed at The University of East Anglia back in the Nineties-and when the model didn't show what they wanted it to show, they fudged the model to make it show what they wanted it to. They wanted to obscure a decline in temperature measurements. They even put a note (code documentation IN the source code!) to show what that piece of the code was intended to do. This would have never seen the light of day, but the server was hacked and the source code became available for people to examine. (for a particularly shameful explanation of this that simply obfuscates and lies the way the media, politicians, and climate alarmists do, see the Wikipedia entry at Wikipedia: Climatic Research Unit email controversy
Anyone who pays attention knows how Wikipedia is completely unreliable for ANY content except for perhaps confirming a date like a birthday (and even then) because they assiduously scrub data from Wikipedia that doesn't agree with their political agenda. I personally use it only to get the spelling of names or dates of events...and even then, I don't trust it.
Another good example of this is Al Gore's infamous "Inconvenient Truth" film where he puts the graphic on the full stage behind him, with the atmospheric CO2 levels for the last 400,000 years at the top of the screen, and the temperatures for the same time frame at the bottom of the screen. (Note this graphic is not what he showed. This graphic shown below takes the two data sets and shows them close to each other, even though it uses the same non-granular time scale at the bottom.
He then says:
"...Now an important point: In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts per million. Now, as I said, they can also measure temperature. Here is what the temperature has been on our earth. One thing that kind of jumps out at you is. Let me put it this way. If my class mate from the sixth grade that talked about Africa and South America might have said, “Did they ever fit together?” Most ridiculous thing I ever heard. But they did of course. The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside..."
Because of this non-granular time scale (very compressed in the graph) and the distance between the two graphs of CO2 and temperature levels, it does appear that when CO2 rises, so does the temperature. According to Al Gore, only and idiot wouldn't see the relationship.
But when researchers made a graph with a granular time scale, and then superimposed the two graphs, the relationship between CO2 levels and derived temperature levels became apparent.
It was consistent.
And is wasn't what they were asserting.
The real relationship was that as atmospheric temperatures rose due to various naturally occurring mechanisms, after a 200 year lag (IIRC) the CO2 levels rose, because naturally occurring rising temperatures caused outgassing of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere. Then, as temperatures fell, CO2 in the atmosphere began to get reabsorbed into the oceans.
This is normal behavior, described in various common aspects of Chemistry regarding the ability of a solution to hold more dissolved substances of some kind at a lower temperature, and as the temperature of the solution increases, it releases the substances in various ways including outgassing of CO2 back into the atmosphere.
When the two graphs were overlaid, this relationship becomes obvious. But they deliberately did not want to display that. They wanted to show gullible audiences that CO2 levels increased, and then temperatures followed, when the exact opposite is the case.
It was deliberate deception.
It is things like these that cause people who actually take the time to evaluate them, to realize that people are trying to sell a fraud...that fraud is Anthropogenic Climate Change.
That climate may be getting warmer is debatable. That some part of that may be caused by man is also debatable. What is NOT debatable is that any increase caused by man is small in comparison to natural change, and that any actions by us to change or control the natural progression of changes in climate are futile.