David McCandliss at Information is Beautiful has tried to create a big visual map of the arguments for and against human-caused global climate change (see below, click to enlarge).
He hasn’t quite succeeded. In part his format isn’t ideal for making the scientific case. In part “I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources” — but he missed Skeptical Science, which would have perhaps led him to stronger and more cogent arguments.
Anyway, I guess I am ruled out as someone who can help him, so perhaps you all can give him some ideas:
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Hi Joe – SkepticalScience.com is listed as one of his sources (now at least, maybe not the first time around). Also, I helped him fix up the CO2 lifetime section, so he’s definitely willing to improve this if you have suggestions.
I think this is a pretty nice treatment. Unusual because I don’t feel like anybody is yelling at me when I read it. Bravo.
Let me address the CO2 absorbed by the ocean. The skeptics position is essentially that of the scientists in the first half of the 20th century; it was overturned in 1956 by the oceanographers’ analysis of buffering capacity. (The skeptics regularly take their “facts” out of context.)
CO2 from the air is mixed into the ocean surface by wind and wave (except in areas covered by floating ice). The depth of the mixing is about 100 meters. Its CO2 is essentially in equilibrium with the atmosphere. The surface ocean is like a cache: easy in, easy out. It is only the CO2 which is downwelled into deeper ocean that is really stored for a thousand years or more. It, and the CO2 produced in the depths by respiration and decomposition, is eventually cycled back up to the surface (and therefore the atmosphere).
So CO2 storage is more like a volitile cache plus a long-loop train of CO2 which takes 400 to 1,600 years to access the atmosphere again. Half of the organic carbon downwelled into the depths hangs around for 6,000 years before becoming CO2.
As a layperson and science teacher I would like a little more depth of analysis from the critiquing. I examined this ‘poster’ a few weeks ago and found it pretty solid. Sure there may be some inaccuracies and many I may not have noticed. Hence I would like to know how you would rate each section. For a media design person to go out and produce this, I think he did a damn good job – no?
A core challenge in a presentation like this: the two “sides” are representing visually & in terms of content amount as ‘equal’. As you are very aware, this is a significant misrepresentation.
I agree with A Siegel (#5).
The deniers claims are usually pretty simple. The science is much more complex. This isn’t a practical solution, but to me to communicate the proportions of real working climate scientists who are deniers and the majority who are not, 3% of the space would go to the deniers simplistic and erroneous claims, and 97% of the space would go to explaining the science, which is much more complex and multi-faceted.
As it is, it’s more a a “He said, he said” kind of thing.
Yet for an audience of skeptics or deniers only, it might have merit. I did appreciate the attempt to distill the science into concise paragraphs and feel that they’re sometimes good, but like everything can be improved.
To me scientists should be working to get their statements this concise, so they fit into forums this concise including TV and other media sound bytes.