A Constructive Scientific Methodology to Improve Climate Figures from IPCC

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scientifically rigorous methodology to enhance IPCC figures by assessing reader comprehension and ensuring modifications meet learning objectives, thus improving clarity while maintaining scientific validity.

Contribution

It presents a formal, validated approach for improving climate figures that balances design innovation with scientific rigor and objective learning assessments.

Findings

Improved figures led to higher comprehension scores.

The methodology ensures scientific validity of visual modifications.

Case study demonstrated practical application and challenges.

Abstract

We propose a methodology to improve figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ensuring that all modifications remain scientifically rigorous. IPCC figures are notoriously difficult to understand, and although designers have proposed alternatives, these lack formal IPCC validation and can be dismissed by skeptics. To address this gap, our approach starts from official IPCC figures. We gather their associated learning objectives and devise tests to score a pool of figure readers to assess how well they learn the objectives.We define improvement as higher scores obtained by a comparable reader pool after viewing a revised figure, where all modifications undergo review to ensure scientific validity. This assessment gives freedom to designers, who can deviate from the original design while making sure the objectives are still met and improved. We demonstrate the methodology through a case study and describe unexpected challenges encountered during the process.