These visualizations make disturbing 2017 temperature milestone look like modern art
The news that 2017 was either the second or third-warmest year on record, depending on the agency doing the official tallying, is not shocking. The past three years were each among the top three warmest on record, with 2016 coming out as the clear winner.
To climate scientists, individual years and where they rank are not particularly significant. Instead, it is the long-term trend that matters, and that's what has climate scientists so concerned about our future.
But how do you bring those long-term trends down to Earth for the average person? It's one thing to say that our world is warming, but it's another to truly drive that home for people who may not have a master's degree in climate science, or be obsessively following this field online.
Climate researcher Ed Hawkins has become well-known throughout the atmospheric science community for his visualizations of temperature, sea ice, and other data describing our warming world. On Thursday, as news broke of the 2017 rankings, he released updated graphics.
This spiral animation above shows the amount of global warming since 1850, and most importantly, how close we now are to reaching the temperature limits set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement. That treaty called for temperatures to increase by "well below" 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, relative to preindustrial levels by 2100. It also mentioned a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the annual global average temperature increased at an average rate of 0.07 degrees Celsius, or 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit, per decade since 1880. However, this rate has sped up to more than twice as fast since 1980 as the amount of greenhouse gases in the air has reached levels never before seen in human history. Seventeen of the top 18 warmest years around the world have occurred since 2000.
Clearly, we're already edging up against the 1.5-degree target, like an advancing high tide crawling up a beach.
Hawkins, who is a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the U.K., also produced this visualization of temperature trends since 1850, using a dataset maintained by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.
It looks like it belongs in a museum.
Hawkins also took a crack at mapping global average temperature anomalies for each year between 1850 and 2017.
The result? A kaleidoscope of colors that belies the alarming implications of such rapid warming, such as sea level rise and extreme weather events.
Of course, NASA researchers and scientists at NOAA also came out with their own visualizations, each of which will help you rebut your uncle or Twitter troll who claims that the world is not, in fact, warming, or that it has nothing to do with human activities.
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It is, and it does.
"Basically all of the warming of the past 60 years is attributable to human activity," said Gavin Schmidt, who leads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The Berkeley Earth research group, which tracks global average surface temperatures independently of government agencies, put out a press release unequivally stating that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, are necessary if we are to slow global warming.
"The increasing abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activities is the direct cause of the recent global warming," the group said in a press release. "If the Paris Agreement’s goal... is to be reached, significant progress towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions must be made soon."
Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
