Scientists Have Found a Perfect Illustration of How the Climate Is Spiraling ‘Out of Control’

Scientists have developed elegant and startling animated visualizations to measure our impact on the climate over the last 150 years.

A few months ago, climate scientist Ed Hawkins created an eye-catching animated visualization of the last 150 years of changing temperatures. The animation was shared thousands of times and touted by several news outlets for its simplicity of design and success in conveying the reality of global warming over the last century and a half.

Ed Hawkins’s visualization, “Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016”:

Now, two scientists — Malte Meinshausen of the University of Melbourne and Robert Gieseke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — inspired by Hawkin’s elegant visualization, have created spiraling designs of their own to illustrate the change of global carbon dioxide concentration since the Industrial Revolution, and the increase in our global temperature since 1850 as we creep ever closer to exhausting our carbon budgets for 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming.

Meinshausen and Gieseke told The Washington Post that they came up with the idea to riff on Hawkins’s work at the U.N. climate change conference in Bonn this past May.

“One motivation to represent the carbon budget and concentration data in the same visual language was to show people the connection,” Meinshausen told The Washington Post by email. “Global temperatures do not simply ‘spiral’ out of control by themselves. There is a cause for that. And that cause is predominantly our continuous use of fossil fuels. Thus, visualising the cause effect chain from emissions to concentrations to temperatures was an important motivation.”

See the three visualizations in concert:

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