The following is a satirical argument intended to highlight some basic errors often made in the climate change debate.

Also, I want to show how easy it can be to fool ourselves with real data.

The subjects that are touched on are 1) signal-to-noise ratio issues in the Earth's climate system (also discussed here and here, for example) and 2) the fallacy of inferring causality from correlation without evoking physics (also discussed here and here).

Those who follow the global warming debate will immediately recognize the similarity to arguments that short-term cooling during a CO2 increase disproves human-caused warming.

Figure 1 – Daily high temperature versus length of day in San Jose, California from February 22nd to April 7th 2012.