BAMOS Vol 31 Special Issue October 2018 Bulletin Vol 31 Special Issue 01 2018 | Page 18

18
BAMOS
Special Issue
Figure 1. Global temperature change blanket by Ellie Highwood. Uses the global annual mean
temperature anomaly with yellows and reds representing the warmest temperatures. The annual
variability is clearly visible, as is the long-term trend.
Talking about the weather
Ellie Highwood
University of Reading
The Royal Meteorological Society has been talking about the
weather since it first began, starting with the handwritten
minutes of the original meetings of the fledgling society. The
first editions of Weather magazine began in the 1940s, and now
the Society has a strong portfolio of paper and online journals,
a new journals hub with publishers Wiley, and a strong presence
on various social media channels.
As academics we are all too used to “communicating” about our
climate change research. For many, the primary written delivery
method is via the peer reviewed journal article, or technical or
specialist reports. We typically present the same work orally
at conferences or in seminars. Indeed invitations to do so at
international meetings or external institutions are a valuable
measure of esteem and weighted highly in promotion cases.
Most of us have hard drives full of slides with text and graphs,
and occasionally videos (this is 2017 after all!).
The traditional slide presentation is all very well and can be a
very effective way of communicating knowledge or indeed
questions still to be answered. It suits most settings in which
academics might find themselves. However, there is a wider
world to which we should also be communicating—and slide
presentations are not always the most suitable method.
Here I argue that if you really want to gain confidence in your
explanations, you need to sometimes leave the slides behind.
I am not suggesting that we return to reading lectures from
behind the lectern, more that we free ourselves from graphs
and bullet points. Not needing a laptop and a data projector can
be liberating, and allow us to reach different people in different
places. Not having slides as a prompt forces you to focus on a
few clear messages (or even just one) and to be creative. Talking
without slides has a long tradition in science communication.
Initiatives such as Soapbox Science and Café Scientifique are not
after all that far removed from Royal Institution demonstrations,
although perhaps take science out to a broader public than the
learned and “society” audiences of the Victorian era.
But before we step completely away from the laptops, let’s
consider the power of different types of visualisation. The “global
warming spiral”, originally designed by Ed Hawkins, is probably
now the most famous climate change visualisation—having
appeared in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics in 2016,
however it has had lasting influence on communication of global
change—similar spirals have been made for sea ice, and other
creative animations of global warming data are increasingly
tested and then promoted by the Twitter community.
Moving further into what might be called the creative arts, we can
group items into those that use actual climate related data, and
those that represent climate change without actually mapping
out the data itself. The art of Jill Pelto who represents any or all
of the decline of glacier extent, rising global temperatures and
rising sea levels in some of her artwork. “Temperature afghans”
are popular in the US—these are blankets knitted or crocheted
in sections coloured according to a temperature data set, most
often the annual cycle of temperature in a particular location. I
recently developed this to represent global mean temperature
change over the past 100 years (Figure 1), which produced
my most popular Twitter post ever and led to a news article in
Inside Crochet magazine—a new type of publication for me I
will admit! Other examples of blankets charting sky colour also
exist. The sculpture of Zaria Forman represents existing glaciers
which observers can walk through—and how they change in
the future. Again, there is something about the tangible nature
of these visualisations and representations that can speak to
different audiences.
So, whilst there is still a place for the “academic conference
presentation”—I would challenge you to take the opportunity
to walk away from the slides at least sometimes, and for some
audiences.