About a year ago, Finnish climate researcher Antti Lipponen posted a new way to visualize global warming, an animation he called the “temperature circle”. It displays the GISS land temperature data as colored bars for each country in the world radiating from a circle. As the temperature in a country goes up, the colored bar changes from a blue bar to a red bar, and gets longer…and wider:
I didn’t pay much attention to the ‘temperature circle’ at the time as it seemed rather gimmicky. But yesterday I was asked on social media about it, and I watched it again. The video has about 163,000 views on Twitter and 175,000 views on Youtube, and its impact on people’s perception is evidenced by some of the recent Youtube comments:
“Excellent presentation of a large mass of data. But the denialists will invent reasons to ignore it.”
“We’re toast.”
“This is among the scariest presentations I have ever seen. Yes, I have kids.”
After thinking about the animation for a minute, it quickly became apparent why warming displayed this way looks so dramatic… and is so misleading. The best way to describe the issue is with an example.
Assume all the countries in the world were 2 deg. C below normal, and then at some later time all of them warmed to 2 deg. C above normal. Here’s the way the ‘temperature circle’ plotting technique would display them (ignore the displayed year and ‘real’ data, just focus on the blue and red segments I have superimposed):
Fig. 1. The “temperature circle” animation exaggerates the perception of warming by non-linearly increasing the area of a colored annulus, even if warming progresses linearly.
Note that the coldest temperatures will have the smallest area covered by blue, and the warmest temperatures will have the largest area covered by red, even though the absolute sizes of -2 deg and +2 deg departures from average are the same.
I consider this very deceptive.
What this display technique does is cause a linear rate of warming to appear like it is non-linearly increasing, or accelerating. The perceived warming goes as the square of the actual temperature increase.
In fact, even if warming was slowly decelerating, it would still look like it was accelerating.
If this was a graphics artist playing around with data in various kinds of display software, I might be able to excuse it as artistic license.
But the fact that a climate researcher would do this is, well, surprising to say the least.
Article originally published on DrRoySpencer.com, used with permission.
Dan Pangburn says
I wonder whether it is evil intent or ignorance that motivates doing deceptive things.
louis wachsmuth says
So, right now, today, we are having record heat or record rain events. This has nothing to do with warming oceans? How can a thousand field based scientists all be either stupid or lying?
Stephen Kirk says
Government grant$ to “say what they want you to say” to gain MORE government control!
MC 62 says
Your comment is a hasty generalization and based on the perception that media portrays with its extreme sense exaggeration for the sake of effect. Is it really hotter than normal all over the world? Or are the records localized to a specific region? The truth is that in some places it is cooler than usual and raining less than normal. After all, recorded weather is a average of extremes. Satellite temps indicate a cooling, and that is the most accurate method of gathering a averaged global mean, but the technology has only been available for 40 years as we were coming out of a 40 year cooling period that many climatologists thought was heralding a new ice age. The truth is that semi0accurate accounting and data for these events only extends back a hundred or hundred and twenty years, so we can only compare with that small portion of recent history. Further, the methods for recording temperature and weather have changed dramatically over the years, so the changes that yields in the data is very hard to account for. The point here is very simple, climate and the related weather it produces is very complex and not easily accounted for and glib hyperbolic headlines are a poor gauge of what is actually going on. In the end, majority rule approaches to science aren’t science but politics, so of course grant dependent, liberally educated scientists are usually going to side with the hands that feed them–one more reason that government shouldn’t be funding any outside agencies beyond national defense and law enforcement.
yan says
You have a point. BUT, you’re welcome to turn the scale around, having lower-than-average-T populating the larger circle. It will still be scary enough.