I recently saw a bunch of tweets in my Twitter feed saying things like:

I agree that's a ridiculous claim. Climate change is not a hoax. Only a fool would say it is. Naturally, I was curious which fools would say it. According to the Politifact article:

But what stuck with readers were the claims that flat-out denied climate change science. The statement "Climate change is a hoax" won PolitiFact’s annual Readers' Poll for Lie of the Year with 31.8 percent of the vote. That claim was the title of a five-minute video released by congressional hopeful Lenar Whitney, a Republican from Louisiana. Several climate scientists told PolitiFact that Whitney’s claim was "laughable," "deeply misguided," "uninformed," "disgusting" and "absurd." We called it Pants on Fire. Whitney, meanwhile, didn’t even make the run-off.

One person, in a primary for a Louisiana seat in the United States House of Representatives with four other people (where she came in dead last), said it. That's a pretty weird person to look to for your "Lie of the Year." A lot of crazy things have been said in House of Representative primaries. They usually don't get called lies. That's because crazy people genuinely believe crazy things.



But whatever. I don't expect fact checkers to care about the distinction between "wrong" and "dishonest." After all, minor differences in word choice don't matter to them. That's why this Politifact piece highlights one of their articles saying:

For example, Rubio said Earth’s surface temperatures "have stabilized," a claim we rated Mostly False. He has a point that there has been a pause in temperature growth over the past 15 years. But scientists say it’s far too early to say temperature has stabilized, and most believe growth will pick back up again.

If you check the link, you'll find a 1,500+ word article explaining it is "Mostly False" to say temperatures have "stabilized" but completely okay to say warming has "paused."

The difference between "stabilized" and "paused" seems a lot smaller than the difference between a "lie" and a "wrong statement." I guess Politifact really does care about minor word choices. When it's convenient for them. For instance, when they want to write a piece about a favorite topic they know nothing about. I say "they know nothing about" global warming because that's the impression I get from another of their articles they highlight:

Some deniers turn the tables and say it’s the government and its scientists that are spinning the data. In June, Fox News pundit Steve Doocy said, "NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming." First of all, Doocy distorted the blog post where he took the claim from. Second, scientists found fundamental flaws in the raw data used to make this claim. We rated Doocy’s claim Pants on Fire.

You might remember that article has come up on this blog before. It came up when Anthony Watts, who is quoted in the article, censored me at his popular climate blog (Watts Up With That?) for disagreeing with what he said about the article. Then, to justify his censorship, Watts made a bunch of things up.

With that going on, I didn't focus much on the Politifact piece. It referenced this blog post by Steven Goddard and focused on a gif he had made:

I, of course, have been highly critical of Goddard. I wrote a piece criticizing him just three days ago. I clearly have no love for him or his work. I also think using that gif to argue people are manipulating data to exaggerate or even fabricate global warming is ridiculous. But so is the Politifact piece about it. Before I get to that though, I want to address a basic, factual issue. The Politifact piece says:

Doocy exaggerated the findings in this blog post when he applied it to global warming. The post itself only talks about U.S. land temperatures and what happens in the United States is separate from global shifts.

This is not fact checking. First, the piece never actually establishes Doocy used Goddard's post as the basis for his claim. It's probable, but you can't just assume things as true then state them as fact. Moreover, Doocy clearly referred to United States temperatures twice ("That's the hottest year on record in the United States" and "The 1930s were by far the hottest decade in the United States").

The claim he exaggerated anything ignores this, focusing instead on his remark, "At least until NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming." If NASA "fudged the numbers" to exaggerate warming in the United States, by definition, it would have exaggerated global warming.

The United States does make up only a portion of the planet, but it does make up a portion of the planet. Adjusting its temperatures upward will necessarily adjust the planet's temperatures upward. Politifact is simply wrong to say "what happens in the United States is separate from global shifts." The two are different, but they are not separate. The United States is not separate from the the planet.

But lets move onto the meat of the piece. The lack of knowledge in it becomes apparent quite quickly:

As far as what the blog actually claimed, while it accurately copied the changes in the government charts, experts in U.S. temperature measurement say it ignores why the charts shifted. There were major changes in how the country gathered temperature information over the decades. Zeke Hausfather is a data scientist with Berkeley Earth, a research group that has expressed doubts about some of the reports on climate change coming from Washington and international bodies. Hausfather took Goddard to task when Goddard made a similar claim about numbers fudging earlier this month. The missing piece in Goddard’s analysis, Hausfather said, was he ignored that the network of weather stations that feed data to the government today is not the one that existed 80 years ago. "He is simply averaging absolute temperatures," Hausfather wrote. "Absolute temperatures work fine if and only if the composition of the station network remains unchanged over time."

Zeke is completely correct. He's just correct about an entirely different issue. The Politifact piece correctly notes Goddard "accurately copied the changes in the government charts." That is, both charts in the gif you see above were published by NASA. Goddard didn't create them. Since Goddard didn't create them, they obviously aren't created by Goddard "simply averaging absolute temperatures."

What happened is Zeke criticized Goddard on one issue. The Politifact piece discussed a different issue but quoted Zeke on the other. I can only assume the author didn't understand what Zeke was talking about as he then immediately goes on to say:

Weather stations that once were in a valley might now be on a hill top and vice versa. But the shift could be greater than simple elevation. Stations were moved from one part of a state to another. The number of stations within a given area shifted. All these differences, Hausfather and other experts said, will alter the typical temperatures gathered by government meteorologists.

Which is correct, but has nothing to do with what Zeke said. Zeke was discussing an inappropriate methodology Goddard uses to create his own results. That has nothing to do with the adjustments formally made to the data by groups like GISS. Even so, the article spends another dozen or so paragraphs talking about those formal adjustments as though the two topics are the same. It then concludes:

As for what the blog said, we found that experts across the spectrum found fundamental flaws in its analytic methods. By relying on raw data, it ignored that the number and location of weather stations and the methods of measuring temperatures across the United States have changed greatly over the past 80 years.

Even though Goddard's charts were taken directly from NASA, showing the results NASA published after making its adjustments. Politifact claims Goddard created that gif "[b]y relying on raw data," but it absolutely does not use raw data. It doesn't "use" anything. It just shows how NASA's official results have changed over time.

So when the piece claims there are "fundamental flaws in [Goddard's] analytic methods," it's being completely nonsensical. The gif it criticizes doesn't use any of Goddard's methods. It couldn't. It shows exactly what NASA published. Goddard had nothing to do with that. He certainly didn't have anything to do with what NASA published in 1999, years before he started blogging.

So when it says:

The experts we reached or whose work we read generally agree that the corrections for flawed data produce valid results. The bare bones approach used in the blog post provides no solution to the issues of weaknesses in the raw data. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

It is being completely incoherent.

The same problem continues in an addendum Politifact published for the piece. I won't bother going through it. It's just more of the same. For people who want to actually understand the different issues Politifact conflated, I suggest reading this post I wrote laying all the various points out.

Maybe someone at Politifact could even read it. I doubt it though. They claim the absurd remark of Lenar Whitney is a lie simply because it is absurd. They provided absolutely no evidence suggesting she does not believe the crazy thing she said. So when they did the clearly absurd and wrote a 1,500+ word article rating a claim as a lie because (they say) results published by NASA are wrong because they were created with methodology a climate blogger created years after some of those results were published, they lied. Sure, the people at Politifact may well believe something so absurd, but by their standards, that doesn't matter. It's a lie.

Or maybe it's not. Maybe it's only a lie if it's something Politifact disagrees with.