As I’m becoming more knowledgeable, I’m becoming less able to straddle expertise with ignorance. The problem is that once humans know something - say, the lyrics of a song - we find it increasingly hard to imagine not knowing it. That’s likely got something to do with the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that afflicts communicators of all bents. Since creating one on the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere and another called Worlds Apart based on its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ☌, making these has, somewhat counterintuitively, become harder. Today I released a visual explainer of the latest IPCC assessment report, the second of three I’ll publish before COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they're indelibly etched.” Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can retain about seven bits of information. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Lynell Burmark, a visual literacy expert, writes that "Unless our words, concepts, and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, reminds us that “Seeing comes before words. How, then, could we better get through to apes with smartphones - especially those roaming corridors of power for whom the summaries are really intended? Not bad, but not good enough on a planet where (1) climate change is still too often relegated to a sideshow in the circus of life, (2) scrolling Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok are just three of the 100s of rollercoasters on offer before breakfast, and (3) scientific jargon and acronym swamps put up prohibitive barriers to entry. Its Working Group III Summary for Policymakers came in at a congenial 53 pages or 28,000 words, just under the wordcount of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Like a set of Russian dolls, the IPCC has tried to present its reports in ways that might convince an interested punter - or even a politician - to take the plunge.
IPCC authors, in preparation for this assessment report since the last one in 2013-14, have ploughed through and synthesised the findings from over 230,000 studies. Does the enormously complex and never-endingly nuanced issue of climate change have to be presented to policymakers, and therefore the public, as the behemoth it actually is? If the proliferation of papers on climate change were used as the measure, the answer would be a resounding yes.
0 kommentar(er)
