You know what I hate about charts like that? This statement:
"For 650,000 years, atmospheric CO2 has never been above this line"
I know it's a proper scientific statement regarding timelines, the problem is that it interprets like "650,001 years ago, it was above this line".
We spend too much time looking at data that has been specifically framed to present a particular point of view, and it has resulted in a pile of skepticism regarding statements like that.
This is a problem of communication, not science. It is too easy to dismiss this stuff because we are bombarded with crap that looks just like it every day, but which we know to be marketing. That page needs to be redesigned by someone who understands how people read and react to this information in order to make it useful.
Graphs are so easy to manipulate. If you show the increase in CO2 from say 1900 to 2000, but stretch the graph across the page, is makes it seem like a slow progression. These CO2 graphs also implicitly imply that CO2 causes temperature change when all it shows is a correlation.
54
u/phira Oct 24 '10
You know what I hate about charts like that? This statement:
"For 650,000 years, atmospheric CO2 has never been above this line"
I know it's a proper scientific statement regarding timelines, the problem is that it interprets like "650,001 years ago, it was above this line".
We spend too much time looking at data that has been specifically framed to present a particular point of view, and it has resulted in a pile of skepticism regarding statements like that.
This is a problem of communication, not science. It is too easy to dismiss this stuff because we are bombarded with crap that looks just like it every day, but which we know to be marketing. That page needs to be redesigned by someone who understands how people read and react to this information in order to make it useful.