Chris Mooney | Want to Sway Climate Change Skeptics? Ask About Their Personal Strengths (And Show Pictures!)

while I am not surprised that John Q Climate Skeptic cannot refute a definitive temperature graph, I think that those who occupy climate denial blogs—a very small proportion of the total public, but individuals who are very engaged on this issue and very intense in their beliefs—would be more than happy to give it a try. In fact, we see them picking apart and undermining graphs, like the Hockey Stick graph, all the time.

In other words, if high bias is combined with high sophistication (as in the case of the most engaged climate deniers), I don’t think the graphical treatment is going to work. Nyhan and Reifler write that “graphs may be effective in reducing misperceptions because they are more difficult to counter-argue”—but some will still be able to. Al Gore showed lots of graphs in An Inconvenient Truth, and that hardly stopped him from being attacked (by people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about ;>).

Flashback: Al Gore’s Big Whopper–Sea Levels Rise By 2100: Gore 20 Feet vs IPCC 2 Feet? « Pronk Palisades

An “over-representation” is a lie. Lawyers call it a material misrepresentation.

Al Gore’s biggest whopper or lie in An Inconvenient Truth, both the film and book, is the 20 feet sea level rise by 2100.

This is in sharp contrast to the 2 feet maximum prediction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).