How to lie with statistics

[Sysman]

10% of road accidents are caused by driving after alcohol consumption.

That means we could cut road accidents by 90% by eradicating sober driving.

True story.

Smoking kills.

A neighbour fell down the stairs on his way to buy some cigarettes.

Went to hospital for a checkup but unfortunately died later that night

[pjclarke]

What do you do if you're a sea-level rise expert denier and you want to show a graph of sea level rise without the inconvenient upwards slope?

Simples! Just rotate the graph on the page until the trend becomes zero...





(And this wasn't the blog of some washed-up TV weatherman, this was testimony to the House of Lords )

[EternalOptimist]

oh dear.

let's give it a rest. just for one week over christmas

[pjclarke]

Upthread.

Graphs with y-axes that don't start from zero always annoy me. It makes a small change look like a much more dramatic doubling, or something. Has anyone ever seen a climate change graph starting at zero kelvins? The resulting near enough straight line would have made it much harder to convince anybody of anything.