IPCC Climate Change Map Criticized
Two researchers are criticizing a map found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report because it “failed to follow several cartographic principles and effectively display information, despite its important content.” In their view, the map misleads because it doesn’t use an equal-area projection, uses different colours instead of hues to represent temperature ranges, and is too complex, with overlapping data. The map is reproduced above.
Personally, I think they’re overstating things (assuming, of course, that the report represents the researchers’ views fairly). An equal-area projection would minimize the polar regions, which are significant in the context of global warming. And the colour scheme mirrors the spectrum: red is warmer than blue. Using hues would obscure the fact that surface temperatures have, in fact, gone down in some regions. It’s okay to disagree with how a map was done, or to argue that you would have done it differently, but that’s not the same as saying that the IPCC got it wrong.
What do you think?
2
The Map Room is a blog about maps by
Interesting. I don’t know that the flaws of the map are enough to make it misleading, but I would say that it’s not a very attractive map, and that in itself is significant. If you want information to get out there - and this map contains some important information - you ought to find a way to display it as attractively as possible, just as the IPCC report ought to be as well-written as possible. And if they wanted to emphasize polar effects of climate change, they could have used an inset polar projection or something, at least. While the projection they used does exaggerate scales at the poles, it also distorts distances and spatial relationships; e.g., on this map, Alaska and Siberia look a lot farther apart than they really are, which makes it hard to perceive regional polar trends.
February 12, 2009 at 6:37 PM
There are polar projections elsewhere in the report, if I recall correctly; this wasn’t the only map (but there weren’t many).
February 12, 2009 at 7:20 PM