How to lie with maps and smoothing – NASA GISS in Antarctica | Watts Up With That?

How to lie with maps and smoothing – NASA GISS in Antarctica

My friend in Europe, Marcel Crok writes to me saying:

Hi Anthony

The two images in the link above are being used wildly during the current heat wave we experience in Western Europe.

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My bullshit detector goes off but I can’t really put my finger on it.

Can you share it with some experts in your network and ask for feedback?

Especially Antarctic looks crazy.

Here is the link and the screencap:

Here is an infographic I prepared that illustrates the problem. There’s only one datapoint, the Amundsen-Scot south pole station, where there data from it is being smeared over a 1200 kilometer radius in the image above on Reddit, but in the image below, using the controls available at NASA GISTEMP, set to the 250 kilometer smoothing, we can see lots of missing data in Antarctica:

Amundsen-Scot station is a nice little city of fossil-fueled warmth, where they measure the temperature for the south pole.