20 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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Tanner Janesky's avatar

Zeke, these are awesome visualizations!

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Martha Ture's avatar

Can the planet survive another 1,300 days of the Trump administration? According to Outlook on Climate Policy Under President Trump's Renewed Mandate, “The second Trump administration could contribute to an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 4 billion tons through 2030 alone, exacerbating risks such as more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires, droughts and famine. Additionally, rising air pollution could lead to more deaths and diseases, potentially resulting in $900 million in climate-related damage on a global scale.” Without doing the arithmetic, let’s assume the 4 billion tons of increased GHG’s is an accurate assessment. What are the effects on Planet Earth of increasing greenhouse gas emissions by 4 billion tons, given that other nations are hard at work reducing their emissions?

Our World In Data provides the answer. The budget to keep temperatures below 1.5°C is less than a decade of emissions at current levels. For 2°C, it’s less than three decades.

https://marthature.substack.com/p/a-magans-guide-to-global-warming

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Bill Slade's avatar

Have you done temperature projections say 10 years out. The human body cannot take more that 46 point something degrees. At that point the body begins to cook from the inside out. They are already experiencing these temperatures in the middle east. For example Kuwait imports labour's from Bangladesh to work outside in the summer. The death toll is quite high.

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cliff Krolick's avatar

Zeke I and my organization greatly respect and appreciate your contributions to climate work. However on the other hand, after years of research stretching back even to the early 1900s up to the present our research has determined that in the Northern Hemisphere there has been one overriding factor leading to the rapid increase in climate warming having with global impacts.. We are not discounting Co2 but we believe it is not the main driver.

It is the vast and extensive level of the Greenhouse Effect occurring and located historically in a region completely unprepared and unable to deal with it. This has led to historic changes in weather patterns, including the blocking patterns of Hi's or Lo pressure systems, reallocation of precipitation quantities, and increased power of storms tornadoes etc.

Would you take a look at a draft of our work? This begins as a story but if you have some patience you will get to the theory and understand why we think there is much more to this issue than it has been given. Please see it through we'd like your feedback. Cliff Krolick

Here is a link:

https://www.hydrodamtruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/A-Sky-Rewritten.pdf

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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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