The Climate Change Visualisation “Cheat Sheet”
16Dec. 09
Most people aren’t climate scientists, so when it comes to information about anthropogenic global warming/climate change they’re in a bit of a sticky situation, especially on the Internet — how do I know what’s right and what’s wrong, and how do I make sense of the mountains of seemingly conflicting information on the subject?
David McCandless, a visual and data journalist, understood this, and so created this — a climate change visualisation “cheat sheet” called Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus.
Here’s what he had to say about why he created the giant information-filled image:
I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources.
Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.
My conclusion is “what a nightmare”. I was generally shocked and appalled by how difficult it was to source counter arguments. The data was often tucked away on extremely ancient or byzantine websites. The key counter arguments I often found, 16 scrolls down, on comment 342 on a far flung realclimate.org post from three years ago. And even when I found an answer, the answers were excessively jargonized or technical.
Most of the info for this image is sourced from Realclimate.org. It’s an amazing blog staffed tirelessly by some of the world’s leading climatologists.
Unfortunately, the majority of the writing on there is so scientific and so technical, it makes the website nigh on useless to the casual, curious reader.
On his website, David has visualisations of other scientific topics, such as the swine flu vaccine and the 2012 cataclysm. He also has a book, which includes physical, paper versions of his visualisations — very, very pretty.
Hat-tip to @JamesSpiller on Twitter for linking me to this.
Tags: art, Climate Science, Data, Global Warming
December 16th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I think I shall have to email this to several people. :)
December 17th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Data is sexy.