At the heart of the climate change debate is a paradox - we've never had more information about our changing climate, yet surveys show that the public are, if anything, getting less sure they understand what's going on.
This programme aims to remedy that, with a new perspective on the whole subject. Presented by three mathematicians - Dr Hannah Fry, Prof Norman Fenton and Prof David Spiegelhalter - it hones in on just three key numbers that clarify all the important questions around climate change. The stories behind these numbers involve an extraordinary cast of characters, almost all of whom had nothing to do with climate change, but whose work is critical to our understanding of the climate.
The three numbers are:
0.85 degrees (the amount of warming the planet has undergone since 1880)
95 per cent (the degree of certainty climate scientists have that at least half the recent warming is man-made)
1 trillion tonnes (the total amount of carbon we can afford to burn - ever - in order to stay below 'dangerous levels' of climate change)
Understanding how scientists came up with these three numbers gives a unique perspective on what we know about the past, present and future of our changing climate.
I saw this last night and am not sure if I am much the wiser. If I had not any prior knowledge I think I would have been totally confused. One impression the casual viewer might get is that the data sets can be manipulated to give any answer desired!
Overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence,
is one of the most common illusions we experience. Stan Robinson
AutomaticEarth wrote:Climate Change - A Horizon Guide on BBC 4. Seems quite compelling.
A few moments in it started talking about the coming ice age as related in 1974.
No, that was just a tiny story blown up by the press. It was never ever a part of climate science.
There's two programmes here Biff and the one that mentioned the ice age isn't the climate change by numbers that 3rdrock initially mentioned. Perhaps you should have preserved with that programme though as I personally think it did get better showing at least some evolution in the science and understanding whereas the numbers programme did , as Potemkin Villager has alluded to , almost seem to the uninitiated as mathematical manipulation .
Either way I can't help but think that these programmes are largely preaching to the converted , the Horizon guide visited at the end a deniers conference was full of people who wouldn't be swayed in their belief that global warming is one huge fraud .
Potemkin Villager wrote:I saw this last night and am not sure if I am much the wiser. If I had not any prior knowledge I think I would have been totally confused. One impression the casual viewer might get is that the data sets can be manipulated to give any answer desired!
Are you under the impression that they can not?
"If we torture the data long enough it will confess." (Don't know who said it first).
