When it comes to earthquakes and tsunami’s Japan may come to mind first, not England. If we frame what we have experienced within the context of our lifespans, this makes sense.  It was a little more than a decade ago that Japan experienced the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that took 20,000 lives.         

If we change our frame of reference to the last millennium, the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicles” reveals that in 1014 there was a great flood, possibly a tsunami, that suddenly wiped-out coastal communities along both sides of the English Channel. And, in 1185 there was a great earthquake strong enough to destroy towns and badly damage Lincoln Cathedral. The Chronicles remind us that the United Kingdom has been hit by damaging earthquakes, storms, floods and plagues (pandemics) multiple times through the ages.          

If we were to use a century as a timeline, the impact of Hurricanes Helene and Milton are no longer outliers. Although Ashville, North Carolina, had been considered a safe haven from the impact of climate change, the devastating flooding and loss of life wrought by Helene mirrors the “Great Flood” of 1916 which killed at least 80 people.          

Timelines matter.  

Baselines are information we use as a starting point to compare data and find meaning in it. From this perspective, they are not static. The damage the great flood of 1014 would likely be far more catastrophic today since a far greater population now lives on the coast. A critical variable for understanding the impact of events – in this case lives lost – is the location and concentration of people, which has changed over time.              

Discussions of climate change highlight the ability of data to tell two very different stories based on different timelines and baselines.  

Those who argue that the temperature of the earth has been subject to significant fluctuations in temperature over the last 300,000 years modern humans have been around are not wrong. Although we have experienced ice ages and periods during which the planet has been warmer than it is today – overall, we have evolved in a relatively narrow and cool temperature range. Expand the time horizon to 500 million years – still short in a geological timeframe – and the earth has experienced far more dramatic shifts. A recent  Smithsonian and University of Arizona study provides a climate model that shows how significant these variations have been.  

Although we are still living within the range of temperatures experienced during the period of human evolution, the changing baseline of population size and location is hugely consequential to those of us living today. With close one billion people living in a low elevation coastal zone worldwide, global warming will have far greater impact on many more people. Our ability to function as temperatures and oceans rise and adapt to a rapidly changing world, will be helped by technological advances, but the world is fundamentally in a very different place.  

It is in this context that a few degrees of temperature change will have a major impact on society. The argument that we have survived and adapted in the past is true, but it ignores the fact that the baselines that will drive the impact on human populations have changed. 

The takeaways around the idea of timelines and baselines from climate change are equally relevant for other data sets that may be leveraged by communicators to tell stories or measure performance.  

If we use short timelines, we may miss the bigger picture or vice versa. Unless we use appropriate baselines, there’s a significant risk that we will fail to see the forest for the trees of what is important. Or put another way, the combination of timelines and baseline are key to separating the signal from the noise. 

From the Editor:

The key lesson for communicators from this article is the importance of framing data with the right timelines and baselines. Whether addressing climate change or any other complex issue, understanding how data evolves over time and how changing variables like population density and geographic shifts affect impact is essential. Communicators must not only focus on the immediate effects but also consider the broader, historical context to deliver messages that are both relevant and resonant. By doing so, they can help their audience better grasp the gravity of the situation and the long-term implications of the data they present.