Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

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When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate. In most cases,
they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.
A Convenient Urgency
FACT QUESTION 13
Global climate experts believe that, over the next 100 years, the average temperature
will …
A: get warmer
B: remain the same
C: get colder
“We need to create fear!” That’s what Al Gore said to me at the start of our
first conversation about how to teach climate change. It was 2009 and we
were backstage at a TED conference in Los Angeles. Al Gore asked me to
help him and use Gapminder’s bubble graphs to show a worst-case future
impact of a continued increase in CO emissions.
I had a profound respect at that time for Al Gore’s achievements in
explaining and acting on climate change, and I still do. I am sure you got the
fact question at the top of this section right: it’s the one question where our
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audiences always beat the chimps, with the large majority of people (from
94 percent in Finland, Hungary, and Norway, to 81 percent in Canada and the
United States, to 76 percent in Japan) knowing very well what drastic change
the climate experts are foreseeing. That high level of awareness is in no small
part thanks to Al Gore. So is the enormous achievement of the 2015 Paris
Agreement on reduction of climate change. He was—and still is—a hero to
me. I agreed with him completely that swift action on climate change was
needed, and I was excited at the thought of collaborating with him.
But I couldn’t agree to what he had asked.
I don’t like fear. Fear of war plus the panic of urgency made me see a
Russian pilot and blood on the floor. Fear of pandemic plus the panic of
urgency made me close the road and cause the drownings of all those
mothers, children, and fishermen. Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic
decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for
that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental
actions, and careful evaluation.
And I don’t like exaggeration. Exaggeration undermines the credibility of
well-founded data: in this case, data showing that climate change is real, that
it is largely caused by greenhouse gases from human activities such as
burning fossil fuels, and that taking swift and broad action now would be
cheaper than waiting until costly and unacceptable climate change happened.
Exaggeration, once discovered, makes people tune out altogether.
I insisted that I would never show the worst-case line without showing the
probable and the best-case lines as well. Picking only the worst-case scenario
and—worse—continuing the line beyond the scientifically based predictions
would fall far outside Gapminder’s mission to help people understand the
basic facts. It would be using our credibility to make a call to action. Al Gore
continued to press his case for fearful animated bubbles beyond the expert
forecasts, over several more conversations, until finally I closed the
discussion down. “Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles.”
Some aspects of the future are easier to predict than others. Weather
forecasts are rarely accurate more than a week into the future. Forecasting a
country’s economic growth and unemployment rates is also surprisingly
difficult. That is because of the complexity of the systems involved. How
many things do you need to predict, and how quickly do they change? By
next week, there will have been billions of changes of temperature, wind
speed, humidity. By next month, billions of dollars will have changed hands
billions of times.
In contrast, demographic forecasts are amazingly accurate decades into the
future because the systems involved—essentially, births and deaths—are quite

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simple. Children are born, grow up, have more children, and then die. Each
individual cycle takes roughly 70 years.
But the future is always uncertain to some degree. And whenever we talk
about the future we should be open and clear about the level of uncertainty
involved. We should not pick the most dramatic estimates and show a worst-
case scenario as if it were certain. People would find out! We should ideally
show a mid-forecast, and also a range of alternative possibilities, from best to
worst. If we have to round the numbers we should round to our own
disadvantage. This protects our reputations and means we never give people a
reason to stop listening.