Climate Change Graphics Made Simple by John Lang

New Zealander John Lang has just finished an unenviable task: taking a jargon-packed, number-heavy report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and turning it into a graphic the average person might read, Eloise Gibson writes in a story for Stuff.

Lang, who is based in London where he works for the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), is the designer behind Worlds Apart which, writes Gibson, leads people through three alternative futures, depending on how fast governments tackle emissions and how the planet responds. The visuals feature filling bathtubs, open doors, and an archer with a bow and arrow demonstrating humanity overshooting 1.5 degrees C of heating – or not.

The IPCC discovered Lang, in 2019 when he made a graphic showing the main points of the IPCC’s special report on ice and oceans.

For Lang, who writes a blog called the e-nvironmentalist, the take-home message was that we can claw the world back from overheating – but the longer things stay hot, the bigger the burden on society.

“I think it’s still not brilliantly understood that actually, even if we do cross 1.5C, which is obviously very, very likely, extremely likely … we can return. But also [I was] trying to portray the burden … [and] show that the burden is going to on fall on future generations,” he says.

Original article by Eloise Gibson, Stuff, October 12, 2020.