I’m talking at the University of Queensland next week so I thought I might use Skeptical Science to test-drive a new visual metaphor. Sometimes in the climate debate, we get a bit lost in the data and statistical analysis, forgetting the sheer scale of the impact we’re having on our climate. A vivid example is the amount of ice that Greenland is currently losing. When scientists talk about ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet, they refer to gigatonnes of ice. One gigatonne is one billion tonnes. To get a picture of how large this is, imagine a block of ice one kilometre high by one kilometer wide by one kilometre deep (okay, the edges are actually 1055 metres long as ice is slightly less dense than water but you get the idea). Borrowing from alien invasion movies, the scale is well illustrated by comparing a gigatonne block of ice to a famous, historical landmark like the Empire State Building:
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Sounds good. A gigtonne of ice is about one cubic kilometer and Greenland is covered by somwhere around 2.8 million cubic km of ice or 2.8 million gigatonnes of ice. I see your problem, I’m not sure how you can present this enormous number and make it mean anything to anyone.