Visualization of the Week

by JS

[The visualization of the week is here.]

I’ve had the opinion that climate scientists should provide expositions of the science of climate change at various levels of sophistication so that interested people from different backgrounds can educate themselves about this issue. Instead we seem to get roughly two types of output from climate scientists: useless press releases and impenetrable scholarly articles.

Ordinarily, this would not be an issue, but climate science is in the unfortunate position of attempting to inform policy, and policy decisions are political, so it seems best to try to influence the debate across many levels of understanding. I’ve said this here before:

… I think it is incumbent on scientists to provide arguments with different levels of justification, so that individuals with different levels of sophistication can access and evaluate the claims given varying backgrounds. But ACRC type claims tend to bucket themselves into two categories: black box arguments (really press releases), and the relatively inaccessible scholarly work. The fact that there are no categories in between is somewhat troubling, especially considering how the policy debate would benefit from those kinds of expositions.

Now that I know about the blog Real Climate, and have at least skimmed the latest from IPCC, I should probably admit that climate scientists are in fact providing more kinds of access to the science than just press releases. However, after stumbling across something like this excellent effort to understand and visualize the debate,  I realize that climate scientists could still be doing so much more.