The Making of a Classic Climate Graph
February 24, 2013
Andy Lee Robinson created one of the new graphic icons of climate, illustrating the PIOMAS arctic sea ice mass graph in three dimensions. All the more powerful now that PIOMAS has been verified by the satellite.
In a comment post at Tamino’s Open Mind, he describes the process. Important insights here for technical folk interested in communicating what they do. Computer and graphics aces weigh in.
I’m an independent Linux system administrator and consultant, have designed server infrastructure for social networking sites and am semi-retired. I am beholden to nobody and nothing except the love of science, truth, beauty and honour. Something that all of us here share.
Tamino’s original. Click it for the animated gif.
Last year, I noticed a tweet by Richard Betts with Professor Michael Mann commenting on Tamino’s above piomas gif, wondering why the y-axis didn’t extend to zero, as it could possibly be seized on it as an attempt to mislead.
I thought I could fix that easily there and then, so deconstructed the animated gif, edited each frame individually with a photoshop macro to extend the axis, reassembled and uploaded the result. Being helpful and being acknowledged is all the motivation I need.Scientists love dry graphs – purity conveying beautiful unobfuscated data intuitive to us, but only because we have years of training to develop the abstract and spacial abilities to interpret that data, and as those skills become natural and transparent, we become less conscious of them.
The public, on the other hand, don’t in general have this ability to interpret graphs properly without some effort. It takes time for someone new to understand and quantify axes and build concepts required to create a contextual framework in which to assess, compare and digest the data, and as the average person now has less attention span and inclination to invest that time, the message and implications can be missed.
(One effect of having fantastic tools like google, is that it can supplant our brains, making them lazier with a consequent tendency to atrophy with lack of exercise. All we need to know is how to find something, without actually having to remember it. There’s a study somewhere about this.)
After modifying the 2D graph, I just wondered what it would look like in *proper* 3D. As I had plenty of time on my hands, new motivation and over 30 years of programming skills in many languages, I got the data and started to play with some ideas for fun and as an intellectual exercise, like some people do word puzzles.
I soon realised it could make a great vehicle for communicating the magnitude of the Arctic collapse, so aimed to make something that looked professional, creative, intrinsically rewarding, entertaining and hopefully captivate a wider audience for long enough to be informed and remember. That became my new goal.
(If there are more informed voters then there is a greater chance of eventually getting some educated politicians that take science seriously and start doing something, even if already too late).It took over a hundred hours of work, programming and experimenting, and was all produced using a text editor on Linux in a terminal window, using perl and php to unpack the data, control scene parameters and create scripts for the PovRay raytracer to render each frame.
In order to produce the video in less time than it takes for a glacier to melt, I wrote a task scheduling system using perl and mysql to distribute and track the rendering tasks across 6 servers to use 20 processor cores in parallel, even including 3 cores from my remote webserver, After all that, and if I was happy with the result after the Nth time, I could assemble the images into a video using a command line tool called ffmpeg and upload to youtube. I then mentioned it on Neven’s Sea Ice blog for feedback, and the rest is history:I had no idea at the time, but this was to be very serendipitous. A couple of days later, BBC Newsnight found it, and included in their report. I saw it and promptly fell out of my chair – gobsmacked! It had reached a huge audience, and rattled a *lot* of cages with the effect that we are all rooting for – to be heard loudly and truthfully because mainstream media is still tiptoeing around of the herd of elephants in the room because of the fear of special interests and change, not realising that survival is not compulsory.
Arctic ice melt ‘like adding 20 years of CO2 emissions’, Susan Watts, Newsnight Science editor, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19496674It soon spread and appeared on other sites:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/11/832161/arctic-death-spiral-the-video/
and on Yale forum by the revered Peter Sinclair
A New Climate State: Arctic Sea Ice 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYaubXBfVqo
Pondering the Path To an Open Polar Sea, Andrew Revkin
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/arctic-ice-melt-and-the-path-toward-an-open-polar-sea
A sobering take on Arctic sea ice (VIDEO)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/a-sobering-take-on-arctic-sea-ice-video/2012/09/24/cfff98f6-065c-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html
Arctic Has Lost Enough Ice to Cover Canada and Texas
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/arctic-has-lost-enough-ice-to-cover-canada-and-alaska-14971With hundreds of hours already invested in the code, it is now easy to automate with new data as it comes out, and could just attach it to a cron job and make one every month, but that may be excessive. I’ll make more over the coming years automatically closer to the next minimum.
Meanwhile, while poring over the data last week, I found a concise and shocking way of displaying all the months’ trajectories together in Death Spiral form, bringing the end points in sharp focus, illustrating the geometric collapse of the minimum, and alluding to the 11th hour.
It is going viral and has probably been seen by a million people by now – but still another 6,999,000,000 people to go…
I’m sure you’ve already seen it by now, as well as the ice cube comparison over New York.
So, I’m doing my bit in helping to communicate, and I have other animation projects in the works, to be revealed.
February 24, 2013 at 7:30 pm
I don’t understand why this is such a big deal; Andy could have just done this in an Excel spreadsheet. 3D graphs are not rocket science. My 16-year old son could have done this in his lunchbreak. (Sorry Andy!)
February 24, 2013 at 8:37 pm
I understand that you don’t understand Martin!
Yes I could have done it in 5 minutes flat, but then no one in the real world would have taken any notice of it, and it would not have appeared on the BBC and have been seen by millions of people at exactly the time it needed to be seen – that was the challenge, and *exactly* the reason why I did it like this.
Rendering 800 frames at 30 minutes per frame takes time. Writing a parallelizing render scheduler on a linux platform using mysql and writing other postprocessing code is also not something anyone can just do in a lunchbreak, though that was the easy bit compared to building and animating the 3D model out of just spheres, cylinders and boxes!
As explained above, it was also about art and communication, conceived and designed using the technologies I know, with music from my own hands. I am just happy it made an impact.
February 24, 2013 at 9:09 pm
I am suitably ashamed of myself. Too much red wine with my dinner (and I had not even watched the video – so was only commenting on the 3D image shown above). Well done for getting it on the BBC. Last I heard they were making room for climate change sceptics who claim we are living in a CO2-deficient world in the midst of an Ice Age.
February 24, 2013 at 9:18 pm
No worries… I did wonder if you had seen it!
Re the BBC, that would really be a sad sad turn of events.
February 25, 2013 at 8:36 am
I was referring to a recent In Our Time programme hosted by Melvin Bragg, which used the term Ice Ages in a very unconventional way. See comments by me and Patrice Ayme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/blogradio4/posts/In-Our-Time-Ice-Ages
February 25, 2013 at 9:42 am
Hi Martin,
I guess that Melvin Bragg at the Beeb sees no problem with half of London going under water. The Docklanders and East Enders will be the canaries in this watery coal mine.
February 25, 2013 at 10:04 am
Very probably true. Also, Bragg probably lives on Hampstead, Highgate, or some other hilltop. How long, I wonder, will it be until London has gated communities where wealthy residents can shoot first and then contact their lawyers.
February 25, 2013 at 10:10 am
Re: ” I wonder, will it be until London has gated communities where wealthy residents can shoot first and then contact their lawyers.”
What? The Hundred Years War is making a comeback? I thought that only happened in rock n’ roll and Hollywood.
February 25, 2013 at 11:00 am
Apologies for missing out the words “How long,” at the start of the sentence! I was distracted by worrying over whether to delete the words at the end of the sentence…
February 25, 2013 at 11:12 am
Re: “I was distracted by worrying over whether to delete the words at the end of the sentence…”
As I was distracted by the end of the world.
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/02/spreading-the-horror/
It’s hard to concentrate on such doom-and-gloom predicting without reviving thought about the Great Disappointment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Disappointment
One is tempted to think that the secular religion of doom due to climate disaster is about as whacky as the crazy religious zeal of the Millerites for the End Times.
I’ve got a feeling the human species will be around for centuries to come. Who else can the networks hire as actors for their reality TV shows after all?
February 25, 2013 at 11:17 am
Thanks for alerting me to a new post on Guy’s blog.
History is replete with people who chose to ignore the fact that Jesus told his followers, “No-one shall know the day nor the hour…”
February 24, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Great, Martin, have him post it. In the meantime don’t piss on Andy’s parade.
February 24, 2013 at 7:57 pm
[...] Andy Lee Robinson created one of the new graphic icons of climate, illustrating the PIOMAS arctic sea ice mass graph in three dimensions. All the more powerful now that PIOMAS has been verified by … [...]
February 25, 2013 at 12:40 am
Great work on the animation.
Just editing standard video takes long enough
By the way..
Probably a bit out of context but is it just me or is there some reason I may have missed.
In that animation it struck me that there was an increase in melt rate at about the same time the was a decrease in overall warming trend.
Is there energy being pumped into melting ice rather than warming air at the moment?
has this been looked at?
February 25, 2013 at 3:17 am
my first response is bingo. this is a little of what Kevin Trenberth was talking about when he complained it was a travesty that we could not track the heat in the system.
February 25, 2013 at 1:29 am
Loved it and I hope it will be an eye opener for many people!
February 25, 2013 at 1:55 am
The Economist Magazine provides another useful graph. This one on the huge spike in human population we are all a part of. The good news? The rate at which we are over-populating the planet is going to slow. The bad news? Not enough to prevent the continued growth in our grasping, greedy, destructive numbers. Welcome to a very over-crowded future.
February 25, 2013 at 6:21 am
The population growth is inevitable, locked in by the current profile of population. See one of Hans Rosling’s excellent explanations, eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vog3uZ47O8
February 25, 2013 at 7:02 am
Thanks. Rosling is not like a lot of the smart people I tend to pay attention to. He has a marvelous way of presenting facts that are devoid of context which is great if one wants to be an optimist in this day and age.
Is the planet getting overcrowded? Possibly….
http://avaxnews.net/wow/Maeklong_Railway_Market.html
February 25, 2013 at 11:19 am
I. Notwithstanding the dominant reason very rapid melting Arctic …, such conclusions: “… not realising that survival is not compulsory …”, “… half of London going under water.”, are (always will be) unscientific.
Let us remember the climate oscillations … (http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html) and climatic “Long tails in regional …” (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050610.shtml) (regional pattern – AA, is very strong) and included in the recent paper the conclusion: “… the region is more likely to have experienced such extremes in the past and thus to have infrastructure which is adapted [...] to such occurrences.”.
II. “Last I heard they were making room for climate change sceptics who claim we are living in a CO2-deficient world in the midst of an Ice Age.”
… in that case, please read this work: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~polissar/teaching/F2012_G9600_Climate_Puzzles_of_the_Neogene/LaRiviere_etal_2012_Suppl.pdf (not forgetting about this sentence in the paper: “… four previously published records within the 15 myr composite are unreliable …”); and (particularly) see graph (Figure 1) and … no longer be surprised skeptics.
March 2, 2013 at 2:42 pm
[...] The story behind these graphs, including data sources, is summarized in this post by Peter Sinclair. [...]
May 1, 2013 at 9:00 am
[...] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgiMBxaL19M&feature=player_embedded For the backstory on what got Andy started, head to this ClimateCrocks article. [...]