An Effective Animation of Global Temperature Change over the Last Century from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies — and Comments on the Art of Graphic and Animated Science Data Presentation in an Anti-Scientific Culture

© 2012 Peter Free

 

28 January 2012

 

 

If you want to get open-minded people’s attention in regard to global warming, this NASA presentation will do it

 

Steve Cole, Leslie McCarthy, and Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record, NASA (19 January 2012) (article with embedded video)

 

 

Some caveats regarding visual presentations of scientific data

 

There are a few obvious caveats associated with presentations of this kind, although I have no reason to think that they take anything away from the NASA-Goddard animation.

 

First, the global temperature animation goes back to data obtained in 1880.  That 19th Century information will not have been as thoroughly or widely gathered as more numerous data taken from the 21st Century.  This means that our “picture” from 1880 and into the early 20th Century is not as accurate as that for 2000-2011.

 

Second, graphing and color coding are dependent upon the size of the scaled increments chosen.  It is easy to make data look impressive by choosing small scale increments and attaching orange or red colors, when the allegedly “normal” range is exceeded.

 

Third, and less obvious — from the hypothetical standpoint, so often clung to by “climate change deniers” — the animation’s use of the “average global temperature from the mid-20th century” as the norm brings some generally unconscious implications with it.

 

When temperature changes are plotted against this allegedly mid-20th Century “normal,” one is assuming that the mid-century average says something meaningful about the stability, or lack of stability, of global temperature over an even longer period.

 

The context (in which this Goddard animation is presented) therefore, implies that deviations from the mid-20th Century normal are significant.

 

However, it is hypothetically possible that global temperature actually varied much more widely than the animation implies over thousands of years.

 

Consequently, climate-change-deniers might well argue that the increasingly orange color trend of the Goddard animation could be deceptive in regard to the big picture and humanity’s implied contribution to it.

 

 

Why education and knowledge matter in regard to interpreting scientific data and presentations drawn from it

 

The only way to persuade climate-change-deniers that the Goddard global temperature animation is not deceptive — is for the deniers to be miraculously endowed with the temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) data that comes via “proxy markers” for both from earlier periods in the Earth’s history.

 

And that, of course, would mean that deniers would have to understand what proxy markers are and why they may be quasi-reliable indicators of past climates.

 

That requirement, in turn, means that deniers would have to become more like folks who are curious, knowledgeable, causation-oriented, and rationally analytical — which denys the deniers’ generally anti-scientific psychic orientation.

 

 

The moral? — well-presented scientific information is a gift to education, but it only works for people who are already primed to receive it

 

Ignorance is harder to eradicate, in the deliberately ignorant, than we generally think.