The beautiful, apocalyptic appeal of « climate stripe » clothes and crafts.
Climate scientists don’t usually become tastemakers.
But Ed Hawkins at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom has a knack for creating haunting viral visuals of humanity’s impact on the planet. And a pattern he created last year is now showing up on everything from flip-flops to blown glass to Teslas.
Hawkins noticed that the past five years have been the hottest on record, as average global temperatures keep peaking in a more than century-long pattern of gradual, and then rapid, warming.
And he wanted to convey to the public in a fresh way just how dramatic this recent warming is — warming that is undoubtedly tied to greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
Why? For one thing, the standard way of visualizing this data — in charts like this — is kind of ugly:
In 2016, Hawkins decided to present this temperature trend as an animated spiral rather than a line graph. The visual soon started bouncing around the web. It was even featured in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro:
But Hawkins wanted to make something with more aesthetic appeal and an even lower barrier of entry for a casual viewer. “We very deliberately set out to make a simple representation of global temperatures” for people unfamiliar with climate science, he told me.
The result was climate warming stripes:
The stirring cerulean-to-crimson bars tell a story about how the planet has changed over the past century and the what’s in store for this one. It’s a vivid visual of the warming humanity is causing. The color of each stripe represents the relative annual average global temperature from 1850 to 2017.
