Rachit Dubey
Data visualizations are some of the most powerful tools in a climate science communicator’s playbook. The most famous have taken on enormous symbolic value—like the “Hockey Stick” graph showing rising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere since the year 1000.The original “hockey stick” graph, as presented by Michael Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K Hughes in their 1999 Geophysical Research Letters paper, "Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations." American Geophysical Union / Chinese Geophysical Society
But designing climate visuals that are clear to the public and policy makers is not a straightforward task. Many scientific graphics, such as those in reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are designed for technical accuracy and often assume a specialized audience. As a result, they can be difficult to interpret. Prior research has shown that widely used scenario graphs can confuse viewers. For example, people often mix up uncertainty about future emissions scenarios with uncertainty in the climate models themselves.At the same time, there is growing evidence that more intuitive visualizations, informed by psychological research, can help people make better sense of climate data.
For example, one study showed that simply highlighting rising temperatures in red increased support for climate action among liberal viewers.This challenge—how to make climate visuals more meaningful to the public—was the motivation behind the recent study I published in Nature Human Behavior with my colleagues in Princeton’s computer science department. We wanted to know whether some kinds of data visuals can help make climate change feel more concrete and better reflect the urgency of the crisis.
We ran a series of experiments with over 2,000 participants. Each person was introduced to a fictional town and shown data about how its winters had changed over time. One group saw a standard chart showing a gradual rise in average winter temperature. The other group saw a binary chart indicating whether the town’s lake froze each year. Importantly, both charts reflected the same underlying climate trend. However, people’s responses were very different.People who viewed the binary “froze or not” charts consistently rated climate change as having had a more severe and more noticeable impact on the town, compared to those who viewed the temperature charts. That is, when climate impacts are presented in black-and-white terms, people seem to take them more seriously.
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