Climate Stripes.
No words. No numbers. No graphs.
Just a series of vertical coloured bars, showing the progressive heating of our planet in a single, striking image 1850-2023.
Created by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading in 2018.
What are the climate stripes?
The climate stripes illustrate the global average temperature for every year since 1850 in the form of a coloured stripe. Shades of blue represent cooler years and red, warmer years. The overall effect is a striking trend towards hotter temperatures in recent decades, as a result of human-caused climate change.
Start a climate conversation
The stripes graphics also show how no corner of the globe is immune from the effects of global warming. Stripes images for hundreds of countries, states and cities are available to download and share for free from the showyourstripes.info. People in every country can see how their home is heating and share the images, helping to start conversations about climate change.
Biodiversity stripes
You can also see the biodiversity stripes, created by the University of Derby, which show the significant decline in species around the world over the last fifty years or so. They show starkly that the population of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles has seen an average drop of 69% globally since 1970, driven by deforestation, destruction of habitats, pollution and increasingly climate change.
We need to address both the warming climate and loss of nature to ensure a sustainable future for us all.
Climate Change:
What is Climate Change?
Climate change is the long-term changes to temperature and weather around the world. In the past, temperatures have gone up and down through natural cycles, however, over the last 150 years, human activities have been causing temperatures to rise higher and faster than ever! The past 20 years have been some of the warmest on record.
Human activities such as burning fuel, deforestation (cutting down large areas of trees) and unsustainable farming have all contributed to the world getting warmer, so it is important we understand how we can be sustainable and help look after our planet in the future.
How Does it Happen?
Imagine planet Earth is a big glass greenhouse. It traps some of the energy from the sun so that our planet stays warm enough for us all to live on it.
Greenhouse gases (the gases stored in our trees and that are released by burning fuel) act as a blanket wrapped around the earth (or greenhouse) that trap even more heat in. The more greenhouse gases that are added to the atmosphere, the thicker the blanket and the more heat that is trapped. This added heat is causing global temperatures to rise rapidly.
Why Should We Care?
As the earth gets warmer and temperatures and weather patterns change, this will have a big impact on us and other plants and animals across the world!
- Animals might struggle to find food and may lose their homes
- Ice in Greenland and Antarctica will melt and cause sea levels to rise
- Weather changes will lead to flooding in some areas, and drought in other
