The New York Times recently released an interactive graph that displays the temperature trend for a given city over 2015. The point of the graph is to emphasize the local trends in global warming, and to give the reader a more tangible feel for how climate change is affecting him or her directly. The idea is great- how get someone to comprehend a phenomena so abstract and large? You bring it close to home. How do you convey such a complex topic, one that may still escape the mental grasp of the reader? You use one simple, large graph. The problem I have with the report, and I think I mentioned this in a previous blot post, is what happens when a year isn’t warmer than the last? NYT can’t publish the same graph and say, “How Much Colder Was Your City in 20_ _ ?” Instead, it must find a way to acknowledge the larger climate change trend, which, admittedly, the NYT does on a regular basis. But those acknowledgments aren’t circulated through social media to nearly the same extent- people don’t seem to be as grabbed by ” x volume of permafrost melt occurred over the past y years, leading to z metric tons of GHG emissions.”

I don’t really have an idea for how to make people care about the meaningful long-term trends, and effects of climate change, but it seems the solution needs to be personal, tangible, and easy to comprehend.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/19/us/2015-year-in-weather-temperature-precipitation.html#state-college_pa

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110113/