From the David Viner School of preposterous predictions, comes this “children just won’t know what winter is” moment. This is climate science done by art designers, no less.
Academics from the School of Art & Design have teamed up with colleagues from the ANU Climate Change Institute on a design project, which takes existing data and communicates the impacts of climate change in a way that people can engage with and better understand.
The resulting new climate tool visualises data which shows by 2050, Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today and will experience a new season the designers are calling “New Summer”.
New Summer represents a period of the year where temperatures will consistently peak in many cases well above 40ºC for a sustained period.
Using the tool, people can click on thousands of locations across Australia to see how the local weather in their home town will change by 2050.
“We looked at the historical average temperatures of each season and compared them to the projected data and what we find everywhere is that there’s really no period of a sustained or lasting winter,” said Dr Geoff Hinchliffe, Senior Lecturer (SOA&D).
“In 30 years’ time winter as we know it will be non-existent. It ceases to be everywhere apart from a few places in Tasmania,” he said.
The tool – which uses data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and Scientific Information for Land Owners (SILO)* – shows how many degrees the average temperature will rise by in each location and how many more days over 30 or 40 degrees a place will have in 2050 compared with today.
“As well as the data, we also focused on developing the most effective visual forms for conveying how climate change is going to affect specific locations,” said Dr Hinchliffe.
“That meant using colour, shape and size around a dial composition showing a whole year’s worth of temperature values in a single snapshot.
“It makes it visually rich and interesting and gives a lot of detail in a way that connects emotionally with people by locating it in their own town,” he said.
“We concentrate on visualisation and storytelling. We don’t want to misrepresent the data or suggest things that aren’t true so the visualisation was instrumental in conveying the data in a way that can be interrogated. “
“It’s like a graph, but more poetic,” said Associate Professor Mitchell Whitelaw.
“The research and innovation here is in the visualisation and compilation of all this data. Our innovation is in the way this existing data is communicated and presented – hopefully in a memorable, engaging way,” he said.
The visual climate tool was prepared for the Australian Conservation Foundation and can be viewed here: https://myclimate.acf.org.a
About the data:
Data extracted from Queensland Government LongPaddock project, which uses the SILO database (http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo) and is operated by the Science Division of the Queensland Department of Environment and Science (DES) with support from the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF).
The climate ‘change factors’ used to calculate consistent climate scenarios data have been estimated using: Coupled Model Intercomparison Research Program 3 (CMIP3) patterns of change data (projected changes per degree of 21st Century global warming) supplied by the CSIRO and the UK Met Office/Hadley Centre; and data from AR4 SRES scenario temperature response curves (projected amounts of global warming) supplied by the CSIRO.
These data sources are available in the following locations:
- The CMIP3 global model database: http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php
- OzClim: http://www.csiro.au/ozclim
- UK Met Office/Hadley Centre: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/resources/hadley
Data modelling:
- Perturbation method: Linear Mixed Effect State Space (LMESS) – Q5
- Global warming sensitivity: High
- IPCC assessment report: AR5
- Emission scenario: RCP8.5
Climate model: ACCESS 1.3
So who do you trust more for climate predictions? Art designers who think their work is “more poetic”, or run-of-the-mill climate scientists who produce non-poetic data? Is adjusted data more poetic than raw data? Does raw data look more blue than red?
Of course none of these people will be around to verify their work in 2050, or to take the rap for making people scared if it doesn’t happen. -Anthony
h/t to WUWT reader Bert Krawchuk
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In a year with (again) record temperatures in Australia, many days over 40C, continued droughts, an extraordinary new development in terms of fires in Tasmania, capped by a 1 in 300 year monsoon flooding dumped on drought stricken territory, it would be a rash person indeed who would conclude this proposal is completely impossible.
Yes, records! Adjusted records. Puhlease Griff stop commenting on Australia you don’t have a clue.
Also, 1-in-300 year monsoon floods often fall on 5 & 10-year drought-affected areas. This is just normal weather happening in Australia.
What on earth are you talking about with 1 in 300 year monsoon flooding Griff? Can I remind you the First Fleet only rolled up in Botany Bay to settle in 1788 (that’s in NSW Griff) and the locals weren’t exactly forthcoming with their meteorological database of rainfall. They didn’t read or write mate because they had no pens pencils or paper
It took some time for intrepid types to get up to Queensland with their rain gauges tucked under their arms knowing the current doomsdayers would be hanging out for their results. No Griff they weren’t driving EVs at the time so it took quite a while just like we only had a reasonable Stevenson Screen rollout to measure temperature and the like for the whole continent around 1910. No recess or lunchtime for you while you stay in and tackle your long overdue history assignment.
Sport, if you lived through 60 odd Aussie summers, in various parts of this vast continent, you would understand the very concept of weather variability. Temp in Melbourne can drop from. 40c to 25c inside 30 minutes. Alice Springs can record a fail max over 45c with a min below 0 same day. Let the BoM destroy inconvenient 100 year records, they are only represent a pimple on a pumpkin. Let them fiddle with the “averages” This is a land of burning droughts and flooding rains. True Aussies just roll up the sleeves and get on with it whatever the weather throws at us.
Trying to find the error bars. . .
Error bars start in centre and radiate outwards several cm past the coloured bits
By gosh, they’re right!
Record high temps in December!
I just noticed that they’ve shrunk the zero point. It doesn’t start at 0 degrees at the innermost point of the circle, but is substantially higher than that. Yet another little piece of scientific fraud being perpetrated by the proponents of CAGW.
this is snipped from a greepeas email i just got for the kids climate protest
(i get their mails to see what theyre up to)
[All of NSW is suffering from complete (yes – that’s 100%!) drought, and it is devastating farming communities. Flash flooding is creating absolute chaos in Northern QLD. Catastrophic bushfires are threatening people’s homes in Tasmania. Heatwaves are sweeping the nation from all over. And half of the Great Barrier Reef – our country’s pride and joy – is dead.]
nsw is copping terrific storms flash flooding etc as i read tonights news
note the utter bullshit about the reef?
We have seen this kind of graph before from Ed Hawkins. It was ;ampooned by Josh then.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/13/friday-funny-another-look-at-ed-hawkins-scary-temperature-spiral/