Connecting dots, anyone?

(image from "how stuff works)


by Dan Savage, The Stranger, June 19, 2013

Four hundred homes went up in flames in Colorado last week.

"Nature Takes a Fiery Toll Despite a Community's Efforts to Prepare," a June 14 New York Times headline read. They're calling 2013 the "most destructive wildfire season in Colorado history." The last wildfire season they described that way? That would be last year's wildfire season—the 2012 wildfire season—when 600 homes and countless acres in Colorado burned.

According to research cited in the New York Times, six of Colorado's worst wildfire seasons have taken place since 2000.


(h/t Tenney Naumer)

Climate change: why people choose ignorance

Image above from Benvitalis' blog

Excerpt from Yahoo news, highlights by "The Frog"

Why Happy People Hide From Climate Change

Takepart.com – Wed, May 22, 2013

Ignorance may be bliss, but bliss also leads to ignorance—at least when it comes to climate change.

...

The study, published recently in the journal Science Communication, surveyed 736 undergraduate students. After asking them how they felt about the topic, the study then looked to see how likely they were to seek and gather more knowledge about it, said study author Janet Yang, a researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

...

Most people—51 percent—also say they don't think global warming is caused by people, or don't know, according to a Pew Research Center Survey. In other words, they do not know that manmade carbon dioxide is increasing worldwide temperatures, the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The most surprising result to Yang was that she uncovered a social "norm" to engage in information avoidance—if a person thought their peers were more likely to avoid information on the topic, then they were more likely to avoid information on it as well. Typically, as is the case with other environmental issues, social norms—what you believe other people want you to do—lead people to seek more information, not less, Yang said.

"If you believe people think you should know more, you are more likely to seek out information," she said.

In this case, if a person spends time with others who avoid information about climate change, then they are more likely to do the same, she said.

The research suggests that when trying to inform people or get them to care about and do something regarding global warming, it may be useful to stir up some kind of emotional response.

"Stirring up emotion and using more visual story-telling—based on the study I think that'd be effective at getting people to seek more information," she said. "We need to deliver a sense of urgency that can effectively stimulate emotional responses to this issue among the audience," the authors continued in the paper.

It could also be useful to portray information-seeking as responsible and favorable. Furthermore, it's important that people understand that they can do something about it; those who thought their actions have no effect were more likely to avoid seeking information, Yang said.

"Risk communication about climate change might benefit from arousing a sense of curiosity or debunking false beliefs about current knowledge so that people are not complacent with what they already know," the authors wrote.

Yang said that she cares deeply about climate change, because it will have "a huge impact on our generation and future generations." When she confronts climate change deniers, she tries to convince them that it's a real problem, if she thinks it's appropriate. But if it's a casual or dinner conversation, "I don't always engage, because I don't want to make people feel uncomfortable," she said. "But perhaps I should."

Communicating climate change in ONE graph

It is sometimes said, that one (good) picture is worth of thousand words. Let's try to do that experiment. Let us have the instrumental temperature record since 1880 till present, coupled with paleoreconstructions of global temperatures using various "proxies" during the last 540 millions years, and add to that the boiling-frog (i.e. business-as-usual) scenario with policy unrestricted GHGs emissions:

*This graph show the reconstructions of global temperature during the last 542 millions years, together worst case temperature rise by the end of this century following the 8.5 RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenario (van Vuuren et al., 2011). 8.5 is amount of additional radiative forcing (in W/m2) relative to the preindustrial period. Global temperature rise of » 4,7°C (8,5°F) is taken from the latest draft report of U.S. Global Change Research Program (p33, PDF). Also note that the scale of x-axis is varying, and that such rapid current+projected temperature rise did not occur during this period. Source of the graph: Wikipedia.

Thus even if we consider large uncertainties of the paleoclimatic temperature record, going anywhere close to the “worst case” scenario would, in the long term, completely deglaciate our planet. Climate change itself would probably not allow such dramatic rise of global temperature, not seen for tens of millions of years, but this is clearly something we would collectively like to avoid. 


A comment by Ugo Bardi:  This post by Alexander Ac is a good example of the subject of this blog. We are trying to "package" the information on climate change in ways that are not only understandable, but also direct and effective. This "one graph" summary of climate change goes in the right direction, but I would like to add a caveat. 

We shouldn't forget that most people, out there, are not able to read even simple x-y graphs. This specific graph, with a variable x scale, is not easy to read and will be confusing for people who never learned the specific "graph language" that scientists find so obvious. Still, this graph may be a winning weapon to penetrate the "climate illiteracy" that affects a good number of scientists and professionals who are not specialists in climate.