Sneaky statistics tricks by the Right

I keep seeing a set of statistics on conservative blogs like Ace and Insty that purports to show that the U.S. is doing better on greenhouse-gas omissions than other countries. Here's the set of statistics showing growth in greenhouse-gas omissions since Kyoto was signed:

* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

This doesn't surprise me all that much because Kyoto was pretty much a joke all along. But I always suspect statistics, and one basic rule of thumb is this: if they quote you percentage increases, ask what the base is. I got especially suspicious when the blog that seems to have started all this decided to give a partial list of individual countries -- and the worst offender was Maldives at 252% while number 4 was Luxembourg at 43%, and number six was Iceland. Now this is a joke, right? Doesn't anybody who knows anything about statistics know that if you start from a tiny base, practically any change will be a "huge" change in percentage terms? I mean, Luxembourg's tininess is proverbial, and Maldives has, what, maybe sixty people in the whole country? Hang on while I look it up...oh, sorry, Maldives has a whoppin' 300,000 people in the whole thing. Ummm...I think the global warming panic is just one more piece of idiocy for the next edition of Charles Mackay's classic, but I'm pretty positive that whatever problem is out there, America's ramping up by 6.6% is going to cause one heckuva lot more trouble than the Maldives' ramping up by 252%, or even 10,000% for that matter.

Fortunately somebody else had apparently been curious, too, and so they had shamed the Thinker into linking to the absolute numbers. So here, children, is why you never trust political partisans bearing statistics:

Maldives 242% -- they went from roughly 0 million metric tonnes to roughly 0 million metric tonnes.

Luxembourg 43% -- they went from roughly 2 million metric tonnes to roughly 3 million metric tonnes.

Iceland 29% -- they went from roughly 1 million metric tonne to roughly 1 million metric tonne.

United States 6.6% -- we went from roughly 1,513 million metric tonnes to roughly 1,612 million metric tonnes.

Kinda puts a bit different spin on it, wouldn't you say? Plus, you could see all the countries, not just "selected" countries, which makes you sort of wonder why the blogger trumpeted the fact that Norway jumped up 24% but skipped over Denmark (down 25%).

At any rate, I did a simple calculation from the spreadsheet that had the absolute numbers on it, and came up with the following comparison of the increase in emissions during that period for the United States, and the increase for the rest of the world put together:

United States: 99 million metric tonnes.
Everybody else: 1,028 million metric tonnes.

The American Thinker can tell itself that George Bush is saving the world if it wants to but I don't think it has that great a case.

Meanwhile, I think the world is way more likely to be destroyed by the consequences of sloppy and dishonest thinking than by anthropogenic global warming. So a pox on both the American Thinker and the global warming hucksters, is what I say...

Oh, by the way, China?

Try 456 million metric tonnes.