Two of the most important things I learned in university are: "Figures never lie, but liars sure can figure," and "If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess." As a climate change volunteer organizer for two years, I've worked hard to understand what 350ppm, 80% by 2050, and other climate numbers esoterica REALLY mean. For instance, I know that the base year (1990 is the year used by the IPCC) used for '80% by 2050' is critical to deciphering the numbers used in proposed Congressional bills, scientific studies, news articles, op-eds, blogs, tweets, etc. But not every layman knows that, and therein lies the problem of global understanding and global solutions to climate change driven by the laymen who will be affected (all of us), and their potential to BE the change our planet needs. If laypeople do not TRULY understand climate change, they are not able to charge their political leaders with the kind of power and direction needed for the scope and scale of the problem. And they will not begin to make the changes possible in their own lives, like using less carbon intensive transportation more often, that will begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As climate change climbs higher and higher to its rightful place at the very summit of the global agenda, so too does the necessity of clear, easy communication to the layman become correspondingly greater and greater. Lord Nicholas Stern's analysis "Managing Climate Change and Overcoming Poverty: Facing the Realities and Building a Global Agreement" http://bit.ly/1NU6r9 provides an excellent example of sweeping away the confusion of percentages and other nuances that provide excellent fodder for those politicians and corporate spin-meisters who want to confuse and misinform the public in their short-sighted desire to maintain a status quo that is killing the planet. He makes climate change very concrete, communicating the magnitude and urgency of the challenge in a way that any layman can grasp far more easily than say, '80% by 2050 from 1990'.
Lord Stern is a former VP for Development at the World Bank, and the author of the 'Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change', the first serious economic analysis of climate change. His study is the benchmark against which all other climate change economic analyses are compared. The Stern Review galvanized world business, as well as government agencies around the world that deal with economics, to start taking climate change seriously. He has described climate change as "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."
His analysis uses terms and measurements that communicate as easily and concretely as we are likely to get when dealing with a global problem that has already impacted the lives of millions, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, changed the chemical composition of the oceans for hundreds of thousands of years, and will require that all 192 members of the United Nations truly become more united than ever before. For one, he measures all greenhouses gases in carbon dioxide equivalents, dealing with all of them in one stroke. This is done regularly in scientific circles, but rarely in the policy arena that is meant for public consumption without getting 'wonkish'. He also uses a 'per capita emissions' breakdown in addition to annual emissions figures, to easily compare between countries. The per capita approach not only allows concrete comparisons for each country, but also conveniently makes the analysis easy for the layman.
His approach first came to light for me in his article from the British newspaper 'The Observer', titled "The world's future is being decided this weekend." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/oct/18/nicholas-stern-carbon-emission) In this article he wrote: "...the United States emits about 24 tons per head while the figure for India is below 2 tons. By 2050, the global population is projected to rise to 9 billion, so average per head emissions will have to be lower than 2 tons per year on average." In two sentences, he compacted the scale and scope of the problem into words anyone could understand: from 24 tons per year per person in the US, to 2 tons per year per person globally by 2050. Like it says in the beer commercial, 'It don't get no better than this!'
You don't have to have a Ph.D. to understand that going from 24 tons per capita to 2 tons per capita (of ANYTHING) is LARGE, and means a lot of things have to change, and quickly. Never before have I seen the only existential threat to humanity, made that succinct, concrete and concise. We can only hope that this clarity in climate change communication by using per capita and per annum measurements will be picked up by others. I hope to see all policymakers, commentators, analysts, and bloggers add this way of measurement and communication to their work on climate change! Using such a concrete way of framing the debate can only help educate and inform the average person, spurring them to get involved and pressure their governments to do more, and more quickly, as well as spur them to reduce their own personal carbon footprint.
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