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by esarbe 1673 days ago
Maybe visualizations like these will finally get the message through to the last bastions of ignorance.

Or maybe not. If at this point you are still pretend to be skeptical about the data, it's probably more to do with willful blindness rather than intellectual rigor and no amount of data will ever convince you otherwise.

Truth is that lots and lots of people benefit from that continued 'doubt' delaying further actions. Even though in the end we'll all suffer the devastating consequences - the political upheavals, the social unrest, the ecological destruction - there are still people that are so obtuse as to think that this will not tough them.

Party 'til the house burns down, I guess.

1 comments

I have a feeling that the climate change charts induce a similar knee jerk reaction as IQ scores or vaccines. Most people have an ideology they subscribe to and will argue using facts and reason in order to support it. I have yet to witness a religious person be reasoned into atheism. I suspect the applies for the above mentioned categories, whatever side of the fence the person happens to be on.
Charts and visualisations are a great way to trick people. Not only is the source data obscured (and so readily cherry picked) but it opens up all sorts of tricks around visual perception.

I also suspect most people yet to be convinced will immediately think back to Al Gore's infamous hockey stick chart when presented with visual simplifications of deeply complex climate data.

At the heart of the matter, looking at such a chart isn't meant to inform you, it is meant to elicit an emotional response, and they have been trained to respond with skepticism.

Surely you mean the infamous lies about the Mann 1999 "hockey stick"? The Mann 1999 results are correct (see for instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5505119/figure/... for confirmation) and the graph doesn't do anything more nefarious than the plot summaries you'll see in imdb: it summarises a complicated thing.
The results are only verified correct for the recent past (for which we already have data for from actual, rather than proxy readings) but even the NAS committee concluded that from 900-1600 they had only mild confidence in the method, and before that very little.
They have been trained to deny evidence that leads to conclusions they don't like.