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This piece was a perfect opportunity for the New York Times to use data and charts to visualize the magnitude of the problem and the timeline of the discoveries
by npunt 11y ago
This piece was a perfect opportunity for the New York Times to use data and charts to visualize the magnitude of the problem and the timeline of the discoveries and activities.
Instead we got a wall of text, and numbers without context like '97,100 metric tons'. I'm sure somewhere deep in there the context was provided, but it wasn't readily available for me as a reader to make a quick assessment of the issues importance, and whether to dedicate 15 minutes to reading it.
Specifically, the lack of subheads and figures made the article really hard to skim, which is rather inexcusable in the age of internet publishing. The only images are a guy with a rolls royce, an overhead shot of the area, a pool, and a gate. Not exactly compelling stuff, nor highly descriptive or additive. The article is very well researched and real journalism went into it, and its a shame it wasn't put together well.
EDIT: dove into this problem more on my blog -- http://www.nickpunt.com/2016/03/31/journalism-and-user-experience/ http://www.nickpunt.com/2016/03/31/journalism-and-user-exper...
- gaur 11y agoThis is another example of "long-form journalism". Some people apparently consider the buried information and irrelevant fluff to be a feature, not a bug.
- buf 11y agoCannot upvote this enough. Laughed out loud.
- jonah 11y agoYeah, it's not "news" as it's been going on for months and is largely "resolved" now.
- Mvandenbergh 11y agoThere's really very little point in putting the information in a very concise, actionable form because the vast majority of readers are not in a position to do anything about it.
- strommen 11y agoIt's not a NYT-quality chart, but I've created a visualization of the problem here: https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/blog/visualizing-the-california-methane-leaks/ https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/blog/visualizing-the-calif... Spoiler alert: this "catastrophe" is a minor blip on our nation's overall greenhouse emissions.
- npunt 11y agoVery nice, thanks for sharing! Definitely puts things in perspective. Even at its size though, its a preventable leak, and any intervention is going to look small compared to our overall output.
- graeme 11y agoI'm confused by cow methane emissions. This leak comes from the ground. So obviously it's a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere. But cows get their methane from plants. Ultimately, are these emissions in the same sense that this leak was an emission? Meaning that if you burn a tree, then plant a tree, your net emission is zero, once the tree grows large enough. Is it the same with cow methane emissions, ultimately? Obviously, the methane is a short run problem, since methane is particularly impactful for climate change. I'm wondering if cows produce a long run net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, or if its merely transient.
- nitrogen 11y agoI'll take a stab at answering: we produce more plants cows like to eat than we otherwise would, methane has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2, and if we didn't produce plants for cows to turn into methane, the same ground would produce different plants that get mixed into the soil (where bacteria will produce some methane, but likely not as much) and the carbon is thus removed from the atmosphere. So to oversimplify, with cows we turn CO2 into methane, without cows nature turns CO2 into soil.
- graeme 11y agoDoes intensive agriculture have a similar effect? It sounds like the net carbon increase is due to intensive grazing depleting soil capacity. Of course, a forest would have more carbon than pasture, just wondering about the net impact of cows vs. some other kind of agriculture.