Artist Adam Nieman was featured in Nature Climate Change recently regarding his work in displaying Carbon Emissions in an understandable fashion. Global change data, like your carbon footprint, is often presented in a manner unintelligible to the average person. Therefore Nieman has set out to make something that gets the message across. HEY! Stop the way you do things for a minute and just think.
A few articles discussing Nieman's work:
Seeing Carbon Emissions by Nic Fleming
Global Water and Air Volume by Adam Nieman
New Ways to Gauge the Finite Atmosphere by Andrew C. Revkin
Scientists that study global change (including myself) often find it challenging to communicate with a broad audience. We scientists often use the language of data analysis, statistical significance, and confidence intervals, but this is not an effective means of communicating with non-scientists.
ReplyDeleteIt's not art per se, but this video attempts to visually show what we know about CO2 in the atmosphere. It focuses on the data (which makes the scientists happy), but is hopefully more visually approachable and understandable for non-scientists.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
It's the best I've seen of scientists communicating visually.
That is a fantastic animation. I especially appreciate the year markings on the right graph. Seeing the change between 1980 and 2000 helped me situate myself in the numbers.
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