I outright accused the Washington Post of deliberately filtering data to push an agenda in their article, and I used the actual data to prove it. Your first two paragraphs underline that. Yes, the media lies, it normally can't be trusted, and it most definitely obscures salient facts. All the time, on many subjects.

I wasn't talking about ice. And I wasn't attacking the original temperature data, which you should have gathered when I used that data to make my point.

Again, I was talking about people in the media and elsewhere distorting data to push an agenda. I'm sorry if you don't like politics, self-interest, and money contaminating the purity of science, but it's happened more than once in history, and in the case of climate, it's currently jammed in there six ways from Sunday, and you can't ignore it forever. And it's not all on one side, no matter how desperately people try to pretend it is.

And I'm sorry if you don't like the idea that even government agencies sometimes have axes to grind in their presentations. You might want to go back and look at what you've written about your days at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. I did. Was everything they put out trustworthy? And was it actual lies, or was it just a case of only using the data they wanted people to see?

I'm not "slandering science." I'm pointing out that people across the board are using science as a political weapon. I agree that if you don't want to deal with that crap here, nobody should force it on you. But remember that snide comments about "deniers" count.

For clarity, here's my original comment:

What I see in this particular case... by TB 2017-05-04 17:53:08

Is one government propaganda mill being overwritten by a different government propaganda mill. Just my personal opinion, of course.

The EPA website wouldn’t be my first choice for researching the climate no matter who was running it. It’s a political entity more than a scientific one.

I did look at the history of weather severity quite a while back. After looking at a lot of sources and papers, I saw that the most common answer from scientists is “we don’t really know for sure.” Apparently there are far too many variables involved to nail the answers down. To be fair, I haven’t revisited the question since then, so something new might be out there.

Unfortunately, too many people on either side are cherry-picking the data to sell the answer they want to sell. What is left out is as important as what is mentioned.

Just one example: remember the news article about the march that took place on the “warmest April 29 ever at Washington Airport?”

I looked it up:

http://www.weather.gov/lwx/dcanme#apr

April 29 was indeed a record high (91) in 2017. What the news article left out is that the day before and the day after had record highs, too (92). One in 1957, and one in 1942. The record highs for the 26th and 27th were in 1915, (94 and 95). Just for fun, look at the month of May.

This takes nothing away from the accuracy of the 2017 number. Just puts some perspective on it.