Avoiding too good to be true: Guiding decision makers toward more meaningful climate information

Climate services are on the cusp of becoming mainstream decision support tools. Many present accurate climate information within the bounds of scientific knowledge and technological development, yet some present climate information of limited “quality”, that is often “too good to be true”: i.e., scientific and technological constraints render it impossible to be as precise or as confident as suggested. This fidelity is rarely apparent when climate services are used to support decision making.

Alongside pursuing academic and technological advances, traditional efforts to counter this disconnect (between what climate scientists know to be the boundaries of what their work shows, and the way in which climate information is used in some decision making situations) has focussed on two groups of actors at two different moments in the production of climate services. Most established is training users how to interpret the climate information, occurring after it has been produced. More recently, climate scientists have begun to articulate guidelines of how to produce “high-quality” information, for other climate scientists to follow during the production of climate information.

We fear that demand for climate services will outpace the dissemination and use of good-practice standards. More positively, we believe the decisions taken to produce the data that underlies climate services could be made understandable for decision makers, making them active interrogators and providing a complementary route to counter the spread of meaningless climate information.

For the production of climate information, we use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle consisting of distinct, interlocking pieces. We illustrate the importance of user context in framing the puzzle, and for each of the constituent parts (e.g. timescales, spatial resolution, indicators) explain the production process and suggest guiding questions those commissioning climate services should ask to probe the fidelity of information presented in climate services.