This is a really interesting visualization. I love the density of the data and the way it captures the year over year variability by month while allowing the annual variability to plainly stand out. This is really good.
The color grading of the years is really bad. The last 20/30 years are all very low in contrast compared to each other, while 1940s and 60s are easy to tell apart, where it is least important. There are so many more colors than yellow/orange/brown, we can use them to get more information density.
Making data beautiful is what this community is about. But compromising readability for a color scheme is just annoying. Present data first, worry about it being extra pretty second.
We're already looking at time being encoded differently than the usual horizontal axis, don't make it harder.
On the other hand, if the purpose of the graph isn't to present individual data points, but to present the monthly trends, then maybe it would have been OK, if the last 3 decades could have started over with a higher luminance set of colors. IDK but I think I would have used colors with more contrast and dropped the warm earthy theme.
Quite the contrary. I have a red-green deficiency (and so do about 6% of men). Viridis Color scale is pretty nice but two much colors are hard to read for a lot of people
In a deep red area here. Talked to locals and they say our temperatures have always fluctuated and that this is just a cycle. I explained that the CO2 in the atmosphere has been climbing steadily and it is at the point it was 100,000 years ago, (actually it was 33 MILLION years) - their eyes glaze over.
If itโs a cycle, ask them when the dinosaurs will come back. When they say โnot like that,โ ask if the continents will come back together. When they say that wonโt happen, ask them to confirm that everything is changing, except the climate.
If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.
Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I donโt even disagree with you that itโll be needed), but that also assumes that theyโll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point thatโs clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.
What frustrates the hell out of me is that if they would just allow everyone who can work from home do so, it helps cut down emissions. It won't solve the whole thing, of course. But it's a super easy way to make a difference.
But control freak bosses are all "Good news, everyone! You must return to working in the office. Because it is so much better. It makes me feel important, you see. If I don't see your butts in chairs in front of monitors, I don't think you're actually doing anything."
Minor stuff like that makes me think that we're really doomed here. Late stage capitalism won't even do the easiest of easy things about climate change.
I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.
In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And Iโm afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still wonโt transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.
I also think that this is what will happen (not only discussed) but unless we master fusion it's practically just fixing a symptom and we'd have to do that for quite a while and the oceans will probably become too acidic.
Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.
I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope Iโm wrong.
There already is no alternative. The amount of CO2 released is going to stay high for a long time (centuries?). People are dying from the current weather.
For the expected response: We need to also stop making things worse. Humanity can do two things at once.
Wouldn't aerosols reduce solar irradiance globally, hence reducing the rate of photosynthesis globally...which further reduces natural CO2 capture? How would that help?
No. It can be localized (for large scales of localized).
Also, we are finding through putting solar farms on crop fields, sun light is not the limiter on photosynthesis for many plants. Many plants get too hot, loose moisture, and photosynthesis less.
I'm just hoping that this past year's jump is due to El Nino and/or higher solar activity and that we have a decade or more before those temps are normal (or low since it'll keep trending upwards for at least 30 years after we stop releasing carbon).
Fortunately it will take more than 6 years for coastal cities to start flooding that much. By the end of the century it is forecasted to go up by less than 2 meter worst case. In 2000 years it could rise as much as 20 years if the temperatures rise 5ยฐC.
Additionally it is much easier to just move to higher ground.
Depends whose lifetime. Mine, maybe not, but for my children - yes. Also depends what indicator - global CO2 emissions maybe falling this year, but temperature will lag decades, sea-level even more (btw I do model these scenarios, so know well how they diverge ).
Why does it seem like this is only the northern hemisphere and not truly "global"? Shouldn't it be warm in the southern hemisphere when it's cold in the north? So shouldn't these groupings generally hover around an average between northern and southern hemisphere temps?
Because the northern hemisphere is mostly land mass and the southern hemisphere is mostly ocean. Land heats faster and cools faster than ocean, thus the seasonal effects are more pronounced in the data.
Same with CO2 patterns which gives a similar yearly 'breathing effect'
That's what I thought... But if it's winter in the north then it's summer in the south, so you'd expect them to average in a way that you wouldn't see such stark differences between say January and July. In July it's winter in the south, summer in the north. Intuitively I'd assume they'd average. Temps would still be rising year over year, but you wouldn't see a difference between months. A couple people have answered that it has to do with the earths tilt and the fact that there's more landmass in the north. Seems plausible I guess.
The way earth rotate around the sun is not a perfect circle, but more like an ellipse, that plus the earth rotational axis makes the summers and winters of the global north and south don't correspond exactly. This is why there's a difference of ~4 Celsius between average January vs average July.
The trouble with going back further is that there wasn't global coverage of people keeping accurate records of temperatures in times past. So they have to look at things like tree rings and make comparisons with historical records. Obviously it gets a little fuzzy going back more than a century. But here's an xkcd that gives a summary of what we know about historical (and pre-historical) global temperatures.
Nice graphic. Although probably you'd see more info with just a lineplot, separating north / south + land /ocean. What strikes me is how regular the gap is over the last year, and how it bulges most in July-December, which suggests the ocean (larger and less variable) dominates the numbers, with El Niรฑo overlaid on steady warming trend. To get it back down quickly, we need more effort on short lived gases - mainly methane (tackling aviation-indeed cirrus might also help compensate for reduced ship-sulphate cooling ) .
There are layers of variability there that can't be captured with a line plot. The data density is too high to even capture the decanal progression in a useful way, forget about monthly and annual variability . So no.