Are you a visual learner? If so, David McCandless at Information Is Beautiful‘s got fantastic educational illustrations for you — that will help you not only visualize global climate change and the debate around it, but also fend off any off-base climate change-denying arguments that come your way.
Take, for example, David’s “Climate Consensus?” diagram above, which clearly shows that the vast majority of climate scientists in the U.S. agree that climate change is indeed happening — despite the loud and frequent and unfortunately overly-publicized denials from the 1% of naysaying climatologists. David’s post with this illustration also shows what fields the climate deniers are in, and makes all data made available in a handy public Excel sheet.
Even more useful for cocktail conversation’s David’s “The Global Warming Skeptics vs. The Scientific Consensus” illustration (small portion above), which shows with simple graphs and boiled-down, easy-to-understand language the fallacies in the skeptics’ most popular arguments. David’s post about the laborious process he went through while putting together this illustration also goes to shows why his gettable-at-a-glance illustrations are so needed:
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.
This has got to be one of the reasons why scientists and leaders are struggling to convince sections of the populace that the threat of climate change is real. Because they’re doing such a terrible job explaining it.
Use David’s work to learn by illustration — and win more environment-related arguments this year!
Images via Information Is Beautiful
Thank you for sharing this info. The first graph is particularly interesting and I guess I did not realize that only 1% of published climatologists disagreed. lol. The crackpot 1%.
Comment by Ben — January 5, 2010 @ 7:01 pm
Yeah — I don’t know how they live with themselves…. It is really interesting, in one of the other graphs in that post, that it’s engineers specifically that make up a huge percentage of the deniers group. Like David, I really wonder — why so many engineers?
Comment by Siel — January 6, 2010 @ 10:40 am