Pirate's Cove

And we need to replace science with those stories

More Climate Change Stories, Less Graphs And Maps

Be honest. If you are walking in the parking lot of the grocery store and you hear someone’s car alarm going off, what do you do? The answer is probably nothing at all (if you even noticed it). Something designed to alert the public now just fades into the background of our busy lives. I also notice a similar phenomenon with the use of the term “breaking news” on social media. On Thursday, the State of the Climate report was released.This report is an annual climate check-up led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and distributed by the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Scientists from around the world contribute to the report. The report basically says the same thing that all recent reports say: Earth’s climate is warming, and that we are beginning to see impacts and trends across the globe. As the report rolled out, I saw excellent articles and information sharing with charts or graphics showing warming areas or trend lines of temperature, sea level, and so forth. However, a part of me wonders if such maps have become the “car alarms” of climate communication. I argue that we need more climate stories, less graphs and maps.

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All of these reasons suggest that data, while important, can be more effective if presented in ways that the public resonates with. I love the Tedx talk by Judith Black who lays out how to effectively use storytelling to move the needle on climate change. Harvard University recently debuted a photography project called, Collapse The Distance: A Climate Change Storytelling Project. My colleague Professor Katharine Hayhoe at Texas Tech University has long argued that effective climate change communication is not about data charts and name-calling but values. Her You Tube series Global Weirding weaves aspects of storytelling and connecting with values to convey complex climate information. Dr. Steve McNulty, the director of the Southeast Regional Climate Hub, also weaves these attributes into his E.L.F.L.A.N.D approach to communicating climate.

Yeah, that ought to do it……except, Warmists have been trotting out stories, art work, poems, demonstrations, painting things green, etc and so on, for decades. I’ve highlighted tons of these things over the years. What they haven’t done is provide rock solid proof that the current warm period is mostly/solely caused by Mankind. Their models are, at best, messes. Mostly, they’re failures. Their predictions likewise fail. They fix the data so that it supports their conclusions. This bears as much resemblance to science as Scientology does.