Last year, Ed Hawkins, Professor of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading (UK), created a very simple, yet very understandable schematic visualization, which, using colored (blue and red) lines, demonstrates the catastrophic climate changes in the USA, England and Canada since the end of 19 th century to the present day. The professor's idea became a real hit. For example, hundreds of meteorologists from all over the world have started wearing ties with the graphic of this infographic to draw attention to the problem of global warming. This year the project was developed. Hawkins created a special website where anyone can see how the average temperature in his country changed from 1850 to 2019.
Information on climatic changes is collected from databases of various meteorological organizations (Berkeley Earth, NOAA, UK Met Office, MeteoSwiss, DWD and others). Whichever country you choose, it becomes clear that the average temperature is rising everywhere, as evidenced by the transition from soft blue lines to bright red and even burgundy.
Let's make it clear to make it clear. Each colored line represents the average annual temperature in a particular country from 1850 to 2018. The average annual temperature for each country from 1971 to 2000 was chosen as the temperature boundary between blue and red colors. Thus, the darkest blue lines symbolize temperatures that have been below the standard values for the last 100+ years, and the dark red ones show the average annual temperature that was above the accepted norm.
Despite the fact that the climate of each country is unique in its own way, looking at these images it becomes clear that the global trend of increasing average temperatures is observed in all regions of the planet.
For example, the USA:
And this is Australia:
Promotional video:
And UK:
For comparison - China, Brazil, Pakistan and Denmark:
They did not forget about Russia and Ukraine:
Despite the fluctuations, it is clear that in general, every country in the world is getting hotter every year.
This is not the first time Hawking has created a simple and understandable visualization of climate change on our planet. For example, in 2017, he introduced the world to spiral animation, which quickly gained recognition. The Washington Post even called it "the most compelling visualization of global warming." You can see it below.
His latest work proved equally convincing. It may be overly minimalistic, but Hawking says he made it exactly that way so that people would pay attention to the most important thing in this message.
Through his Twitter page, the scientist also encouraged people to use these graphs in their own creative way and share the results with others so that as many people as possible know about the problem of global warming. As examples, he published the first works in which one of his readers, based on this visualization, created an adhesive film and covered his Tesla electric car with it. Another reader used the image as a design for a dress.
Nikolay Khizhnyak
