About the author: “Randall Hoven is a retired Boeing technical fellow with a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees in engineering, which is two more master’s degrees than Bill Nye the Science Guy has. He teaches at a university now, not on TV.”
LOL!
Also, there is a fallacy in Hoven’s fundamental assumption, and that is that the overall trend would be linear.
But more than that, I have an issue with Hoven’s thesis: he presents the graphs only, not the data sets. His argument would be much better accepted if he presented the data in tabular form to illustrate exactly where the data have been altered. As a user of Excel, I know how changing or adding just one data point can change this particular type of graph, because the results are very sensitive to that. Which means that the accuracy of the results is something that must be considered when using such data. The trend is what is important; not the numeric value.