It's shocking to me that they just saw two partially aligned curves that confirmed their biases and then wrote a best-selling book (yes, I bought a copy as well

It's shocking to me that they just saw two partially aligned curves that confirmed their biases and then wrote a best-selling book (yes, I bought a copy as well) selling their admitted "hypothesis" while completely ignoring or giving short shrift to any alternative hypotheses or other possibilities for why those two curves seemed to be in alignment. This seems, to me, to violate scientific ethics. And now they write an article in the Economist, of all places, defending their terrible science. Freakonomics took a few outrageous "things you didn't know about X" headlines and made a fortune selling fool's gold.