I'm rather taken with this elegant visualization of @ClimateChange from the BBC. Particularly as it clearly shows how anomalous 2023 was.
It's a Ridgeline plot (also sometimes called a joyplot, after the iconic album cover from the band #JoyDivision).
I just wish they'd used a pre-industrial average as the baseline. 2023 was 1.48°C warmer than pre-industrial times according to the Copernicus data.
@micefearboggis
True, but irrelevant.
The lede in the article is 2023 was 1.48°C warmer than pre-industrial (3 significant figures!). Then all the graphics use a different baseline. That's a mess.
For a news article, I don't see any problem generating a pre-industrial baseline from the same model, and then addressing the uncertainty in a footnote. Sure, you wouldn't do this in a paper for Nature, but this is a very different audience. Simple clear messaging matters.
@steve Simple clear messaging *that's in line with the underlying science* matters. The 1.48C in the lede is missing an uncertainty estimate too.
The difficulty for the plot is, which pre-industrial baseline do you pick? The dataset Copernicus produce only goes back to 1940, so the BBC would have to choose a method for converting to a pre-industrial baseline. There are multiple methods. The method you choose changes the message.
See https://diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/will-we-reach-1-5c-in-2023-or-2c-on-tuesday/ for a more detailed analysis
@micefearboggis Yeah, but no journalist is ever going to put an uncertainty estimate in their lede. Nor on their charts, to be honest, largely because it would confuse most of their audience.
Talking of which, the differences from choice of baseline are also largely irrelevant for this audience, so your method 3 (shifting the axis by 0.69°C) would be a perfectly reasonable choice for a BBC article, and is scientifically defensible, especially if it's noted somewhere in the caption.
@micefearboggis But I have a more interesting question for you. In your (great!) blog post you say: "For any particular threshold, there will likely be a period of time when it is not clear whether we are above or below it"
The threshold should also have an uncertainty range on it. Which means the question shouldn't be whether we are "above or below" it , but: "above, within the uncertainty range, or below".
Wouldn't that be much better messaging as we approach the 1.5°C ±X threshold?
@steve No journalist would of course. An uncertainty range would confuse their audience. But not providing one misleads them. Tomorrow, five other groups will release their numbers and they will all be different. It's the work of one sentence to clarify all that.
Your suggestion for a fuzzy threshold is an interesting one (and thanks for the kind words about the blog post). It acknowledges the uncertainty, which is great. Whether it's practical, I don't know.
@micefearboggis well we’re going to be saying maybe for a decade anyway. My argument is instead of saying maybe, we say we’ve entered the threshold (or some such form of words)
On the threshold?
In the 1.5 degree zone?
On the cusp?
The key will be to communicate that it will take a number of years to pass through the threshold. Ie it’s not an instantaneous thing.
Steve Easterbrook
John Kennedy
