Cranky Uncle cartoons available as PPT slides

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Since finishing the Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change book, I’ve frequently dipped into that 176-page clip-art library, reshaping the cartoons to fit the 1920 x 1080 pixel format for Powerpoint presentations. I’ve also adapted many of the cartoons for the Cranky Uncle video series.

Over the last few weeks, a few people have asked if they could use some of my Cranky Uncle cartoons in their climate talks. In response, I’ve now collected a bunch of 1920 x 1080 Cranky Uncle cartoons and uploaded them all in a freely available Powerpoint presentation. Any educators, scientists, activists, or climate communicators giving a talk about climate change are welcome to use any of the cartoons in your talks. They are free to use (but letting us know the context of how you used them in the comment thread below would be much appreciated).

Almost all the cartoons come from the Cranky Uncle book with a few exceptions. One is a cartoon I drew of Scott Pruitt. This was actually in the first draft of the book, which I wrote back when Pruitt was head of the EPA. Pruitt actually featured quite a lot in that first draft – which I think was a way for me to cope with the frustration of the endless series of scandals following him. My editor wisely advised me to trim Pruitt from the book, suggesting it would date very quickly. Sure enough, Pruitt was fired before I even finished the first draft!

Another cartoon I drew after the book was finished was a cartoon I drew for a Guardian article by Dana Nuccitelli. As is usual for Dana, his article was excellent and went viral so that the article got featured on the Guardian homepage – which meant my cartoon appeared on the Guardian homepage for a short while. That was fun!

This last cartoon was in the Cranky Uncle book, illustrating the strengthening consensus in IPCC attribution statements. In 2018, I sent this cartoon to Ben Santer asking for his okay to use his caricature in this fashion. He gave me his okay. Then in early 2020 (those pre-pandemic days when people congregated safely in groups), I attended a talk by Ben in Washington D.C. and was delighted to see he had been using that cartoon in his presentations. However, it bothered me that he was using a cartoon that wasn’t fully utilizing the 1920 x 1080 area (those kinds of tiny details really bother me). So after the talk, I went home, restructured the cartoon, and emailed it to Ben.


UPDATE 26 Aug: Thanks to Bärbel Winkler who translated the PPT into German.


UPDATE 9 Sep: Thanks to Robert Leven who translated the PPT into French.


Note to anyone interested in translating

The PPT is now available as a blank template – all the text removed from the cartoons to make it easier to add translations. Please contact me if you’re interested in translating the PPT into another language.

8 Responses

  1. Nigel Powell

    Hi John, I love your new cartoons. I’ve just used two of them in a short thought piece I created for our climate change programmes.

  2. Lelia Hawkins

    Thanks John! I used your slides for a guest lecture on fallacies in a “physics of climate” course at Harvey Mudd College. There were great, and the students really got into figuring out the matching fallacy for each misleading claim. This is a great resource that makes teaching these ideas much less time-consuming (and therefore, more likely to happen!)

  3. Aqsa Farooq

    Hi John! These are absolutely amazing! I used one of your cartoons for a virtual summer school I’m doing for students who are thinking about studying Psychology at university, while illustrating a point about climate change misinformation. I have also directed them to your videos about COVID and critical thinking. So relevant and helpful! Thank you!

    • John Cook

      Great to hear the cartoons are useful and I hope helped in your goal of encouraging more students to study psychology! (and thanks for spreading the word re my videos).

  4. Suzanne OConnell

    I love these. They are so useful in talks and to get a conversation going. Thanks so much for making them and making them available.

  5. Frederik Bub

    Thank you John for the great work. I am a research assistant in physics didactics and use the FLICC scheme and Cranky Uncle in a course for undergraduate students of teaching physics and recently used it in a reduced form in a 10th grade class for a high school. I will describe my experiences in a teacher’s magazine so that hopefully many physics teachers in Germany will soon work with FLICC and Cranky Uncle. For the children, I have created a kahoot quiz that I am happy to share here: https://create.kahoot.it/share/wissenschaftsleugnung-klimawandel/fbb38dc9-7b86-4807-a480-b42a18cf07ae If desired, I can also create an English version 🙂

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