Valerie Masson-Demotte, climatologist at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, explains the “summary for decision-makers”. Videos to the rescue So yes, the summaries for decision-makers of the Phone Number List five IPCC reports contain many figures, intervals, and levels of uncertainty which can be seen as greater rigor in the rendering of the work, but also as greatly weighing down the reading of the document and therefore as being less effective in terms of communication. How to get out of this antinomy? By infographics, for example? When we compare the figures of the first IPCC report with those of the fifth, we measure the extent of technical progress in computer graphics operated in 25 years.
The flaw that also appears is the desire to use these technical means to synthesize three or four figures of the complete report into one with lots of panels, arrows, bars, colors… thus making it very complex to interpret. The synthetic quintessence of the figures in the 2013 summaries is sometimes, it is true, as difficult to swallow as those Savoyard biscuits that you take with you when you walk in the mountains. It takes a bit of cash to get them through… That's what I did with a few colleagues using videos to explain each figure in the 2014 Summary for Policymakers. of the summaries for decision-makers is that it is not only the scientists who have “grown up” as their topic has become richer, more refined, and suddenly more complex.