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

Insist on the Data
Al Gore’s words echoed around my head long after that first conversation.
To be absolutely clear, I am deeply concerned about climate change
because I am convinced it is real—as real as Ebola was in 2014. I understand
the temptation to raise support by picking the worst projections and denying
the huge uncertainties in the numbers. But those who care about climate
change should stop scaring people with unlikely scenarios. Most people
already know about and acknowledge the problem. Insisting on it is like
kicking at an open door. It’s time to move on from talking talking talking.
Let’s instead use that energy to solve the problem by taking action: action
driven not by fear and urgency but by data and coolheaded analysis.
So, what is the solution? Well, it’s easy. Anyone emitting lots of
greenhouse gas must stop doing that as soon as possible. We know who that
is: the people on Level 4 who have by far the highest levels of CO emissions,
so let’s get on with it. And let’s make sure we have a serious data set for this
serious problem so that we can track our progress.
Looking for the data after my conversation with Al Gore, I was surprised
how difficult it was to find. Thanks to great satellite images, we can track the
North Pole ice cap on a daily basis. This removes any doubt that it is
shrinking from year to year at a worrying speed. So we have good indications
of the symptoms of global warming. But when I looked for the data to track
the cause of the problem—mainly CO emissions—I found surprisingly little.
The per capita GDP growth of countries on Level 4 was being carefully
tracked, with new official numbers released on a quarterly basis. But CO
emissions data was being published only once every two years. So I started
provoking the Swedish government to do better. In 2009, I started to lobby for
quarterly publication of greenhouse gas data: If we cared about it, why
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weren’t we measuring it? How could we claim to be taking this problem
seriously if we weren’t even tracking our progress?
I am very proud that, since 2014, Sweden now tracks quarterly greenhouse
gas emissions (the first and still the only country to do so). This is Factfulness
in action. Statisticians from South Korea recently visited Stockholm to learn
how they could do the same.
Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignored or denied,
and the vast majority of the world knows that. But it is also way too important
to be left to sketchy worst-case scenarios and doomsday prophets.
When you are called to action, sometimes the most useful action you can
take is to improve the data.