June 21st is the Summer Solstice, not only does it mark the first official day of (astrological) summer but also the 5th annual #ShowYourStripes Day. It is a time focused on spreading awareness about climate change and rising global temperatures.
The stripes in question are the iconic Warming Stripes, a graphical representation of the change in temperature over the past 100+ years. Originally created by English climate scientist Ed Hawkins, the stripes help to represent the long term rise in global temperatures.
Each stripe represents one year and the color corresponds to temperature in comparison to the long-term average.
Peter Girard from Climate Central told us, “#ShowYourStripes is a celebration of the design that doctor Ed Hawkins put together. He's an English climate scientist and he had come up with this very simple way of showing the earth's warming trend. And when you look at the stripes, they explain themselves really easily, it goes from cool to warm. And it reminds you that over the course of the last hundred and 50 years, the warmest years in the planet's history are all bunched in the present. They're all the last few years. Our world is getting warmer and until we do something about our emissions, it will keep getting warmer”
Warming stripes are available for 11 global regions, 49 US states and 179 US cities. Here is a look at some of those representations
Global temperature trends from 1850 to 2021 for all locations.
Getting a little more specific to North America this is the result.
This temperature change only dates back to 1901, when widespread records become available in all North American Nations.
The United States date records go back to 1895 and California's go back to the same year.
In all of these depictions the darkest red colors are in the most recent years.To look though more locations and other depictions of the data visit this link.
