sometimes life takes you by the hair

Animation shows advance of climate change with horrifying clarity

Ever since the “hockey-stick graph,” climate science and graphic design have been intimately associated with one another. It’s a tough science to communicate, since it plays out over the course of generations, taking potentially hundreds or even thousands of years to complete a global climactic shift. How do you effectively communicate a subtle but potentially catastrophic shift for our planet? Do you use a log scale, or a linear one? Do you use annual averages, or high temperature records, or what?

A new visualization from University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins has a novel approach: putting monthly average temperatures on a circular graph and animating the outward spiral toward certain amounts of deviation from that month’s global average in the 1850-1900 range.

The graph chose 1850 as the earliest year in the animation because that’s when we begin to see the temperature data we need to make the comparison. The red lines represent 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius deviation from the 1850-1900 global temperature average for that month. Those thresholds were chosen by the international community, not Hawkins — at the end of the day they’re just nice, round numbers we can use for comparison, but they are useful because they tend to be associated with major shifts in global climactic behavior. The goal, seemingly impossible at this point, is to stop the outward spiral before it hits the 1.5 degree mark, but the 2.0 mark is clearly the more achievable goal.