The animation he made has received a lot of attention both at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, where he works as a professor, and on Twitter.
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What does climate change look like?
“I wanted to try and visualize the changes we’ve seen in different ways to learn about how we might improve our communication”, Hawkins told Tech Insider by email. Using HadCRUT4.4 temperature data from the past 166 years, the unique animated chart does a great job of showing the rate at which global temperatures have increased over the past century and a half. A fellow researcher at the University of Oslo, Jan Fuglestvedt, gave him the idea of a spiral.
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, used data from the Met Office Hadley Centre to show how rapidly the global temperature has risen in the past few decades.
The image has resonated for a number of reasons – one of them being, as Hawkins says, that it “doesn’t require any complex interpretation”. Some climatologists believe that rising temperatures need to be limited even further – to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) – in order to prevent serious damage to the environment. It targeted slowing down the rise in greenhouse gases, to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F), compared to pre-industrial levels, by 2100.
Hawkins said that the new animation showed the link between the current global temperatures and the desired target. The first is that from the 1950s through the 1970s, scientists believe that sulfate aerosols from air pollution helped counter the warming effects of carbon dioxide and keep the planet, temporarily, cooler than it might have been otherwise.
While the last couple of years have set a record for the “warmest year” on record, 2016 is gearing up to exceed the record.
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El Niño event has served as a small push to the record-setting temperatures in 1998 and in 2016. Granted, we wouldn’t actually be fully there until the average temperature stayed at that level – a brief excursion across the red line wouldn’t cut it.
