Big numbers without context are rife in discussions about climate change (not to mention the state of the nation’s economy). I find it annoying: if you say you will eliminate XX tons of CO2 but don’t provide context or state it as a percentage of what’s possible, it isn’t informative.

But providing context often isn’t easy, as Natalie Angier points out in a N.Y. Times article about Fermi problems. 

Fermi problems (named for the physicist, who used them as brain refreshers with his atom bomb team), take a big question and break it down to smaller components to get an estimated answer. One question the article posits is, if you take all the miles Americans drive in a year, how far into space would it go? What’s revealed in the process can be as revealing as the answer itself. Unraveling the question flexes the brain with news ways of thinking, and gives communicators new ways to get the point across, too. It can tell a story of sorts, and make the abstract real.

In answering the miles question, you find out how many miles the average person drives (per Angier’s mechanic, it’s about 12,000). Say there is one car for every two Americans, that’s 150 million times 12,000, or 2 trillion miles. Then note that Pluto, the unplanet, is only 3 billion miles from here, and you’ve got a nice way to make the staggering concept of all those miles driven more concrete.

Angier also looks at a topical problem: how much cropland is needed if we decide to fuel our cars solely with corn-based ethanol? Lawrence Weinstein, co-author of a book* on Fermi problems, uses calories consumed as the starting point. There are 30,000 calories in a gallon of gas, and the average car uses a gallon or two a day. Since a person needs only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, Weinstein says, we’d need “20 times more farmland, so this could be a bad idea.”

You can also help people comprehend amorphous figures by translating them into everyday concepts. For instance, to show how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million, you could point out that 1 million seconds equals 10 days, and 1 billion seconds runs to about 32 years. Neat.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to know if anyone has ideas for relating carbon equivalents. I want to see an alternative to “the equivalent of taking XXX cars off the road.” Just how much CO2 does a car produce? Taking it off the road for how long? It muddies the issue, provides no simple, concrete image, and says nothing about the amount of pollution relative to the problem.

*Guesstimation: Solving the Worlds Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin, by John A. Adam and Lawrence Weinstein. We have to love this, given how Thinkshift got started.

The cover feature in the The New York Times Magazine’s recent “Green Issue,” “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” delivers rich food for thought for communicators. The article delves into what decision science research tells us about how people respond to environmental issues. Basically, our tendency to undervalue future benefits, assess risk based on emotion, and deal with a “finite pool of worry” spells trouble for efforts to deal with climate change.

It’s a long article not amenable to summarization, and it’s worth reading in full for the insights it provides on how we might communicate more effectively about climate change solutions.  For example, this nugget: a fee for carbon pollution described as an “offset” gets much more support than one described as a “tax.” Turns out it’s not necessarily the principle of paying for pollution that people object to; it’s the negative loaded term “tax” that inspires rejection.

That’s no surprise, you might think, but in environmentalists’ discussions of the pros and cons of a carbon tax, “people won’t accept a tax” is always a main con. Calling it something else to make it more palatable doesn’t seem to have emerged as a solution. People may fear that it won’t work because the public will see it as a dodge, but that may be true only when you’re using alternative wording that’s already been tagged as misleading and has its own negative connotations–”fee” instead of “tax,” for example.

Such solutions lead author Jon Gertner to an interesting ethical question: is this unfair manipulation? Gertner writes:

[Elke] Weber and David Krantz, two of the co-directors of CRED [Center for Research on Environmental Decisions], have given the matter a good deal of thought, too. ‘People need some guidance over what the right thing to do is,’ Krantz told me. But he said that he was doubtful that you could actually deceive people with decision science into acting in ways that they don’t believe are right. ‘Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?’ he asked. ‘You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.’

I’m with Krantz: what’s the harm in helping people get to an end they want (and I think most people, even if they don’t see it as a priority, would like to halt climate change) by working with their brains instead of against them? Read the article and see what you think.

A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, “From Workplace to Anyplace: Assessing the Global Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions With Virtual Meetings and Telecommuting,” is worth checking out. It includes background research on the drivers for and barriers to adopting telecommunications technologies among policy makers, business leaders and end users. Not surprisingly, saving the environment isn’t a key driver—in fact, it’s the lowest-ranked reason for videoconferencing. Efficiency, saving money and social improvements top the list, confirming that to encourage lasting behavioral change, communicators need give people a payoff beyond simply doing the right thing and feeling good about it.

As an aside, the headline, “Report: Teleworking Could Cut U.S. Climate Emissions in Half” on the Sustainable Life Media news item first alerted me to the study. It made me say “Wow!” But it tells a different story than the research report, which estimates that telecommuting and virtual meeting tools worldwide could cut CO2 emissions by about 3.5 million tons by 2050—the equivalent of half the United States’ current emissions. The headline implies that if U.S. businesses boosted telecommuting, virtual meetings and the like, we’d cut our emissions in half—I only wish that were so.

Update, 4.04: Sustainable Life Media has changed the opening sentence of its piece in response to my comments. I have to add (as I should have the first time around), SLM has terrific editorial standards, and if they were less than pros, a slip like this wouldn’t be worth a mention.