Even worse, viewing this almost makes me less inclined to worry about climate change. That is in nearly a decade the leading headline is jellyfish closing down a power plant. Hmm, ok, let's spend trillions of dollars to fix climate change, or a few million to upgrade power plant water intake systems to protect against jellyfish swarms.

So, seeing this I sadly now understand why politicians and companies are greenwashing everything. Talk is cheap and will get you support, but the consequences of the problem won't be seen until you are well into retirement.

http://www.wunderground.com/news/oceans-may-be-primed-jellyf...

It's also worth remembering that the Earth's climate over most of the 20th century was amazingly stable by historical norms. Year-to-year variation was fantastically small compared to the kind of thing seen pretty routinely in the past few thousand years. There were no multi-decadal mega-droughts, no dramatic swings in northern hemisphere temperatures of the kind seen in the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period, and so on.

It follows from this that even a return to natural variability is going to be challenging for us, and it's unlikely that the 1.6 W/m^2 that anthopogenic greenhouse gasses are adding to the mix is going to make things any calmer. Adding energy to chaotic systems rarely makes them more stable, and while the detailed consequences of the additional energy are unclear (despite what the "science is settled" folks claim) there is very little doubt that we are adding 1 - 2 W/m^2 to the Earth's energy budget.

That said, here's a relatively agnostic argument for carbon taxes, which the data show are pretty effective at curtailing greenhouse emissions: most carbon tax schemes are designed such that the revenue they generate allows governments to lower corporate taxes and person income taxes. Now, unless you're a wild-eyed socialist revolutionary who hates wealth and capitalism, you're likely in favour of lower corporate taxes and personal income taxes. I know I am. I would far rather have a tax on something bad (dumping waste into the atmospheric commons) than something good (income!) So I think there's an argument to be made for carbon taxes that even the most ardent capitalist can like, if not love.

Regardless you are getting hung up on 'colder', the key is more extreme weather. To that point the IPCC does mention more extreme storms, if you want a reference googling that yourself will bring up plenty.

I'll assume you live in sunny California and extreme weather to you means rainstorms not crazy ass cold polar vortex dumps of snow and ice.

so yeah, sure, some jellyfish close down a power plant, but it probably causes loads of financial losses... i think this actually already happened? we are probably looking at complete collapses in housing, transport, sanitation and health in the coming decades if politicians and companies keep at the greenwashing. as an anarchist i don't care, but too bad for all those suckers who got kids and worry about their future.

Right. You won't need a retirement fund because you will rule the apocalyptic wasteland.

And a very important point trying to be made. But in this case the visualizations actually reduced value, making it more about the bells and whistles, and less about the actual message.

V

    n = 11300 g / 44 g/mol = 256.82 mol
    R = 8.314 L kPa K−1 mol−1
    T = 293 K
    P = 101.3 kPA

 = (256.82 * 8.314 * 293 / 101.3) L

 = 6175.8 liters

 = 3087.9 uncapped coke bottles every 15 minutes (high estimate)

n = 50 / 44 = 1.13 mol

So:

V = 27.33 L

  = 13.7 uncapped coke bottles every 15 minutes (low estimate)

If you genuinely want to understand then I recommend reading Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen, or at least googling a few book reviews to get a sense.

It may be worse than that... Those charts show higher levels of several greenhouse gases than has occurred in hundreds of thousands of years, not centuries.

This hurts the users because they have to spend more time/effort, it hurts the cause/business because some users just give up, and it hurts the reputation of the web design profession because people then associate them with complex solutions which is definitely not the outcome they are (or, should be) aiming for.

I'm not the authority on this subject but my idea is that the designers are more successful when they can present very complicated information in a more basic way without sacrificing usability. The problem could be getting paid by the complexity of the outcome, rather than the utility. Just a guess.

The key point is that communication is expensive[1]. And not just because bandwidth is physically expensive, or the opportunity costs of waiting about, or the usability nightmares that inevitably ensue; but also because decoding itself is mentally taxing. And every panache adds up to it. So it better be worth to the recipient.

So when you double-down like you did, Flash-era intros and all; and it turns out all there is to it is a sparse bunch of unnavigable, decontextualized[2], tweet-sized digests of a policymakers' digest; and on top you can't even turn the damn globe on your own to explore the simulation results yourself (arguably the sole reason to be using WebGL at all!); then... well, I hope you see why your site would be so exasperating.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...

[2] Pro tip: leaving uncertainty terms to the 'for climate nerds' section is borderline unethical.

The click-drag interaction on desktop is slightly goofy. We discussed adding cursor key and clickable arrows for previous and next, but concluded that it wasn't that bad. It's super nice on touchpads and touch.

Keep in mind this energy transition has occurred before, back in the 16th century. The UK used to depend on wood for its energy. The US led in adopting coal, which was used only marginally for thousands of years. Coal was dirty, it stank, required new technologies to collect and distribute, while wood was cheap and plentiful. As it turns out coal was fundamental to the industrial revolution, the US as a leader in coal developed new industries and led in industrialization and leap frogged Britain.

I see human kind at the same crossroads, but with bigger stakes. Do we want to stick with fossil fuels until we potentially destroy our climate or can we discover new sources that will potentially introduce a new energy revolution, and who do we want leading this new energy revolution?

Bill McKibben (founder and leader of 350.org) endorses a 95% ban on fossil fuels. He says that oil companies are "Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization."

I realise it's tangential to the article, but where on earth did you learn your history of the industrial revolution [0]? Presumably in the USA?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

Edit: And in other browsers where it shows stuff, it's a visual clusterfuck. I wonder if the "heatmap" on that globe is based off any real data, or just a plasma function with a curve.

Also, thanks for the further reading link. :)

It's quite interesting already. And i note in the gif down the middle of the page that on mobile only one event is ever on screen, while in chrome i often had 5+ on screen, with very little space inbetween them. If you spaced it out more on desktop, it would become much more grokkable.

Edit: There's also the fact that i have a hard time distinguishing between land and see, between the globe rotating wildly and the colors washing across it.