This scientist just changed how we think about climate change with one GIF

[eridani]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/11/this-scientist-just-changed-how-we-think-about-climate-change-with-one-gif/

The image has resonated for a number of reasons — one of them being, as Hawkins says, that it “doesn’t require any complex interpretation.” It uses data that was always there, of course — data from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center which document the globe’s average temperature anomaly monthly and annually going back to the year 1850. (Two U.S. agencies, NASA and NOAA, do the same but only go back to 1880).

Hawkins took these monthly temperature data and plotted them in the form of a spiral, so that for each year, there are twelve points, one for each month, around the center of a circle – with warmer temperatures farther outward and colder temperatures nearer inward. At the same time, he took the pre-industrial baseline temperature to be the average temperature from 1850 to 1900, and put out markers for where a 1.5 degree Celsius rise above that temperature would be, and where at 2 degree Celsius rise would be, in the form of larger, red concentric circles.

And then, of course, he made the whole thing animated and tweetable.