Maggie's Farm

When your computer models don't fit the data, trash the data: Via Watts:

 As a commenter here quoted:

‘AGW is in fact now an industry (as well as a religion) and your insistence upon peer-reviewed papers makes me smile because there seems to be a preponderance of reviewers from within the AGW industry. Why do I think of the expression “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”?"

Money managers do this sort of thing all the time for marketing purposes. To make their performance look good, they pick their start point and their end point based on what the chart looks like. Then they decide whether to include or exclude new money or new accounts from the data, depending on what looks best. Etc.

Tinkering with data is easy. Pols and activists do it every day to manipulate. See How to Lie with Charts and Graphs, one of my favorite data books - after the classic How to Lie with Statistics. Nether require advanced math to understand.

It's a shame journalists aren't required to read those two books.