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.
