I’ve written repeatedly about experiments in climate and energy communication and education that mesh the arts and science.
Examples include student-created “explainers” on geo-engineering and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Here’s some background on a new, and much discussed, effort (below), which compares the impact of steroid use on home run production to the impact of accumulating greenhouse gases on the frequency of weather extremes:
The steroid analogy has been percolating for awhile, but its roots go back quite a few years, as you’ll see below. The cartoon was commissioned by the folks who run the National Center for Atmospheric Research. I reached out by e-mail to Noah Besser, the artist who created the animation, and Gerald Meehl, the climate scientist who provides the background and main narrative voice, along with another climate scientist, Anthony Broccoli of Rutgers University, whose earlier use of the steroids metaphor caught Meehl’s attention. It’d be great to see more such collaborative experimentation involving the arts and science. Here’s how the project came about:
Here’s a short exchange in which Meehl explains how the animation came to be:
Q.How did you first settle on the steroids analogy?
A.I had read on a couple of blogs last summer where versions of the steroids analogy were used to illustrate climate change. Apparently this can be traced to a lecture done by Tony Broccoli from Rutgers back in 2006 where he used a somewhat different application of the analogy. I used those sources to come up with my own version. I tried it out at an NCAR science communication interest group that Matt Hirschland organized last summer (he’s the head of communications at NCAR), and with a group of student interns at an Aspen Global Change Institute session last summer. People seemed to like it. It works…for virtually any sport (for a European audience I substituted cyclist for baseball player and it worked just as well).
Q.So how did this particular team approach to visually explaining the greenhouse
contribution to temperature records come about?A.I had contributed to a piece on NBC Nightly News last fall (with Anne Thompson doing a great job) with the steroids analogy. It went over pretty well, and Bob Henson et al. here at NCAR had been looking for a project to do with an animator he knew.
The idea was that they wanted to create the animation as a new kind of way to communicate climate change, and they thought the steroids and baseball analogy would make for a good visual animation. They asked me to do the commentary. So one day he sat down in my office and we did a tape of me talking about the steroids analogy. They took it from there, apparently using my words as a starting point to create the script and animation.
I contacted Anthony Broccoli of Rutgers to get to the root of this analogy. Here’s his recollection:
The story (a slightly long one) begins some years ago. I was trying to explain the pitfalls involved in answering the question “Was this weather event a result of climate change?” I developed the following analogy.
There is a veteran baseball player who has a high batting average but no power. He starts weight training during the off-season. In his first at-bat of the new season, he hits a long home run. Was this home run a result of his off-season training? I discussed two possible answers, each flawed: (1) “Yes, no doubt. He always could make contact, but now he’s stronger. I bet he’ll lead the league in home runs.”
This answer is obviously flawed because the sample is too small to draw a conclusion.
(2) “No way. That was a fat pitch that anyone could hit. His weight training had nothing to do with it.” The less obvious flaw here is that weight training might increase the probability of hitting a home run, even if it was a fat pitch. When I used this analogy in a talk (might have been mid-2000s), I noticed some muffled laughter and realized that the audience was thinking about performance enhancing drugs, which were much in the baseball news at the time. So when I gave the talk subsequently, I jokingly included a third possible answer that alluded to some current story about performance enhancing drugs. Although I was using the steroid allusion for humor, it must have morphed as it traveled along the grapevine into the analogy that Jerry has used so successfully.
I also asked the artist, Noah Besser, to describe how he works with scientists and their institutions to create his amusing, simple animations. He first pointed me to the string of videos he created to explain the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, a crowd-sourced meteorology data base gathering precipitation information from individuals and, particularly, schools around the country. It was that work that caught the attention of Bob Henson and others in the communications office of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Here’s how Besser describes the process of interpreting basic science through moving images and an ample dose of humor:
There is a preliminary concept meeting at the start. Many times people will give me the ideas they want to convey and then I will write a script. In this case, the concept was so clear that [the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which runs the National Center for Atmospheric Research] had a foundation for a script that they wrote. The interludes with my sped up voice were added later to help the story along. Once a script is agreed on, I make a rough video storyboard with any of the imagery requested, while I try to add my own twist to it. For example, UCAR knew they wanted to show a baseball player on steroids. I made an old timey baseball player for fun and to not draw any comparisons with Major League Baseball’s recent history or specific players. I also try to add different elements of humor that I can.
From that point, I receive notes on changes to be made and I start on the actual animation. Once I’ve done that (which takes a week or so) a back and forth process starts of notes and changes until we get it where we want it. It’s much like a fun game of ping-pong. The whole process can take anywhere from 2-8 weeks depending on the number of revisions, the length of the animation and the quality of the animation.
I love this work because I can combine the things I love (drawing, humor and animation) while helping communicate messages that I am passionate about to a wider audience. The goal is to get these messages out there to inform, but also hopefully inspire people to learn more.
I’d love to see more such collaboration, and particularly efforts in which students in graphics, arts, film and related areas work with science departments at their universities to develop this kind of content.
This is one reason I’m trying, as part of my “Knowosphere” push, to help build a clearinghouse for people with science communication needs (e.g., harried science teachers) and people — from scientists to animators — who can fill the gap, on a budget. This excerpt from a 2011 post conveys the notion:
Another ripe field is the use of graphics and animation to convey complicated information to broad audiences. NASA, once again because of its mandate, has an entire Scientific Visualization Studio devoted to this kind of work. I could see agencies and universities creating a kind of Match.comfor scientific information in search of fresh experiments in visual, and even auditory, communication. I mention sound because I recently came across some experiments using sound to convey the scale and character of the 11 March great earthquake (in one iteration, lower pitch equals deeper depth, louder volume equals more power). [ Read the rest.]
Please get in touch, or comment below, if you are working along similar lines or know of such efforts.