The main problem here is that there is lots of uncertainty about lots of these quantities. I didn’t see anything that seemed grossly unreasonable on the chart, and as always with uncertainty about a central estimate, things might be worse as well as better. But how hard would it be to represent that in a graphic?
Also in my opinion there’s a slightly disturbing sprinkling of chartjunk that weakens the presentation, but there certainly are worse examples out there.
Representing uncertainty is always a challenge but I think this does a good job of representing the scale of our emissions, compared with the ‘safe’ amount of carbon we can burn and how much carbon should be left in the ground.
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The main problem here is that there is lots of uncertainty about lots of these quantities. I didn’t see anything that seemed grossly unreasonable on the chart, and as always with uncertainty about a central estimate, things might be worse as well as better. But how hard would it be to represent that in a graphic?
Also in my opinion there’s a slightly disturbing sprinkling of chartjunk that weakens the presentation, but there certainly are worse examples out there.
The first version of the graph has some problems but it has since been fixed:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/12/doha-infographic-underestimates-human-emissions
Representing uncertainty is always a challenge but I think this does a good job of representing the scale of our emissions, compared with the ‘safe’ amount of carbon we can burn and how much carbon should be left in the ground.