'Climate spiral' shows temperatures spiralling out of control this century
A Nasa visualisation of climate change shows temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2021 – showing how the Earth has warmed in the last 140 years.
The visualisation, updated for 2022, uses data based on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4), an estimate of global surface temperature change.
The animation shows how global warming has gathered pace, showing the average monthly temperatures as a spiral shape, which gets bigger as the world gets warmer.
The spiral was initially designed by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in 2016, but has been updated by Nasa with the latest climate data.
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The latest version, updated this month, has been widely shared on Reddit.
The Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) is a Nasa laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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Hawkins also created another visualisation, ‘climate stripes’, which aims to illustrate our warming planet in a single image with no numbers or annotation.
The University of Reading says: "Each stripe represents the average temperature for a single year, relative to the average temperature over the period as a whole.
“Shades of blue indicate cooler-than-average years, while red shows years that were hotter than average. The stark band of deep red stripes on the right-hand side of the graphic show the rapid heating of our planet in recent decades.’
The climate spiral has bands showing Earth’s progress towards one degree of warming, then two degrees.
Two degrees is a significant number in the battle against climate change.
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In 2015, almost 200 countries agreed to an ambitious goal to limit climate change, known as the Paris Agreement or Paris Accord.
Signatories agree to keeping temperature increase, "well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels".
The agreement, signed by 191 nations in the French capital at the UN COP21 climate conference, commits its signatories to limiting temperature rises this century.
Signatories agree to keeping temperature increase, "well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels".
To achieve the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, global carbon emissions need to be halved by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ (where emissions are balanced by carbon absorbed by plants and carbon-capture technology) by 2050.
A rise of 1.5C is considered important, because above that level, there will be more heatwaves, extreme weather events, droughts and greater economic losses.
If countries continue on their current path, the world will see sea levels rising by more than two feet by 2100, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
