Harsh summer weather that maroons researchers in the
Southern Ocean near the South Pole feeds the global warming debate. With the
group of global warming doubters on one side and the believers on the other, some
say it is ironic imagery juxtaposed with some rather convincing scientific
graphs. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and by now you might have seen dramatic images of passengers on stranded icebreaker Akademik Shokalskiy being rescued by helicopter last Friday after becoming lodged in Antarctica sea ice on Christmas Eve.
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Another type of
picture - the graph – plays a major role in science. No one could look at
the graph below, which shows the extent of arctic ice during the past 1,450
years, without realizing that the polar ice cap has been melting at a rapid and
wholly unprecedented rate over the past few decades.
Skeptical
Science
Similarly,
my own research has shown that if people are shown a graph with global temperatures
during the past few decades, they invariably understand and predict that further warming is in store – this is true even for the few
people (less than 10% in my sample) who denied that climate change is taking
place.
Graphs and
pictures are powerful scientific analysis and communication tools.
Graphs and
pictures, and the anecdotes they can evoke, are also powerful means by which
people can be misled, inadvertently or otherwise.
It is well
known that the national newspaper, The Australian, has a track record of distortion and
misrepresentation when it comes to climate reporting, so it is informative to
examine what role pictures, or the anecdotes they evoke, often play in their
reporting.
The recent
adventures of the Australian expedition to Antarctica are a case in point.
Under the headline “Stuck on a ship of (cold) fools”, the newspaper
opined:
“You
have to feel a touch of sympathy for the global warming scientists, journalists
and other hangers-on aboard the Russian ship stuck in impenetrable ice in
Antarctica, the mission they so confidently embarked on to establish solid
evidence of melting ice caps resulting from climate change embarrassingly
abandoned because the ice is, in fact, so impossibly thick.”
An ice breaker
gets stuck in ice – we’ve all seen the pictures – and somehow this is an
embarrassment to “global warming scientists”.
Read more at ENN affiliate The
Ecologist.
Confused
penguin, stranded
research ship, and global
warming graph merged and morphed by Robin Blackstone.
