Image: The Climate Deniers vs. The Consensus

David McCandless, fascinated by global warming skeptics, made this lovely little graphic. Curious how anyone could deny such a widely reported phenomenon, he deliberately researched climate change through only publicly available web sources to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.

His conclusion? “What a nightmare.”

“I was generally shocked and appalled by how difficult it was to source counter arguments. The data was often tucked away on extremely ancient or byzantine websites. The key counter arguments I often found, 16 scrolls down, on comment 342 on a far flung realclimate.org post from three years ago. And even when I found an answer, the answers were excessively jargonized or technical.”

He pitted these arguments by—experts? anonymous forum posters?—against “The Larger Scientific Community,” taking most of his information from realclimate.org (a blog staffed by some of the world’s leading climatologists and unaffiliated with any environmental or political organization). The image has since then been amended in several ways due to enormous feedback.

The graph:

Like everything else posted to Information Is Beautiful, much of the message’s power is visual and relates to placement. There are a lot of small, deliberate factors to parse. For example, the arguments of global warming skeptics on the left and the scientific consensus on the right shapes how we take in the information. We read left to right, so we look over the skepticisms first and the “facts” second. What is meant to stick with us is the rebuttal, the final thing we read.

Note the colors of the headings—pink for the skeptics and green for the scientists. Pink is basically a derivative of red—at times a “warm” color; here, a loud and angry color. (It may imply Red State Republican. Hell, it may also imply an anti-Crichtonian “Global warming skeptics are totally gay.”) Green is “cool” and composed and, of course, has eco-friendly connotations.

Not only do the charts and graphs in the middle give us an example of the data in question . . . they also physically divide the two schools of thought. They demonstrate part of how convoluted the situation has become, saying that half of the fight is caught up in how to read a single set of data.

Conclusion:

Clearly, McCandless stands by his belief in human-driven global warming—right from pitting mere “Skeptics” against “The Scientific Consensus” in the header to the coloring and placement of many elements in the graphic. And I’m with him.

He points out that researching and building the image was a “mammoth undertaking, especially for someone like me, unschooled in climate science.” He shares this bit of information to thank anyone who finds errors and lets him know how to fix them, but it’s more loaded than that. Unschooled in climate science, eh? …Well, at least he admits it.

Thankfully, he lays bare all his sources (in a ZIP of all the data he collected plus a spreadsheet of all the sources) in an act of legitimation.

So, why bother with all the research, especially if it was jargonized and confusing? To repair the explanatory failures of the higher ups by polishing them and presenting them prettily. McCandless said, “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.” It hearkens right back to Crichton and to Balder’s team of lawyers struggling to present information on global warming interestingly to a jury (or, in Crichton’s nonfictional case, to a reading audience).