The general public tends to trust the numbers behind things; statistics are key to understanding how drastic a particular situation is or can be. But the fact of the matter is that many people manipulate their statistics in order to appeal to their own argument. Maybe not changing the numbers themselves, but manipulating the way in which they are presented in order to get the response they are looking for. In this particular post, I'm going to look at how certain graphs and statistics can be manipulated to look good or bad to the audience. In this case, we will be looking at climate change. Let's start with a good example. Above is a graph depicting the levels of carbon dioxide it the atmosphere over thousands of years. The consistency of the graph remains in tact, with the Y-Axis increasing by 40 parts per million between each line, and with the X-Axis decreasing by 50 (thousands of years before today) by each line. We are clearly able to determine that the carbon diox...