16 Comments
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Ed Hawkins's avatar

Lovely graphics Zeke! The original climate spiral had a ‘tornado’ version too: https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/

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Zeke Hausfather's avatar

I'd forgotten about those! It turns out that little in science is fully novel, just marginally improved ;-)

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Andy Redwood's avatar

These are awesome - can I ask what program you're using to make the visualisations? I've been experimenting with some warming stripes visuals in Blender, but haven't figured out how to base them on actual data yet...

https://bsky.app/profile/andyredwood.com/post/3ll522cde7k2e

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Zeke Hausfather's avatar

I use python (matplotlib) for all my visualizations (and have started using LLMs for coding help in the past two years). Here is the code for the spiral plots: https://github.com/hausfath/scrape_global_temps/blob/master/Climate%20spiral.ipynb

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Andy Redwood's avatar

Thanks, I'll check out matplotlib and see if it's something I (or an LLM) can import into Blender.

By the way, I sent a message to the Climate Brink inbox recently about collaborating on a visual about the rate of change (inspired by your post with Devin Rand). I think the Skeptical Science folks will also add some ideas, let me know if it's something that would interest you.

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maurice forget's avatar

What can we, ordinary people do? They produce too much oil, plastics, lies, fears, deaths, incertitude...

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Brian Beffort's avatar

As Bill McKibben responded in answer to your question: Don't be an individual. Join a group or a local committee to do things. And don't underestimate your personal choices and sharing your concerns and strategies with neighbors and friends. Tangible, local solutions count for a lot in your local community, and they're a lot easier than beating your head against a national policy wall.

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Michael's avatar

Perfect image to accompany part 1.

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Cletis Boyer's avatar

I was born in 1940 and thus find your graphs doubly fascinating! Beautiful!

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Michael's avatar

Same decade. Agree.

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NSAlito's avatar

[Meta question: Does The Climate Brink have an RSS feed?]

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NSAlito's avatar

Ah.

It had a tyop.

Thanks!

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Alternative Lives R Available's avatar

Thank you! I think a lot of the problem of getting climate information across to uninformed people is their lack of imagination. Your graphics inform very well, and I particularly like the iterative effect of time. I think every new way of presenting information will inform a different group of people. Good work!

I would love to be able to put any particular location or city into such a program or app and for it to produce such a local graphic (which, after all, what most people are interested in).

I also wonder if it is possible to project the time series forward by, say, 10 years - a time scale most people can directly relate to?

No pressure, but as you enjoy making these things so much....... 😬

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Zeke Hausfather's avatar

There is already a version of that here for the standard stripes graph: https://showyourstripes.info/

And the NCA5 has a good climate atlas for local (US) data: https://atlas.globalchange.gov/

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Alternative Lives R Available's avatar

Thanks Zeke, I'll take a look.

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