Warming stripes
Professor Ed Hawkins works at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the U.K. He created the warming stripes to simply communicate the fact that the planet is warming.
Topic
Type
Article | 05:23 min read
Portrait of
Ed Hawkins
Location
Redding, U.K
Interviewed by
Adam Morris Philp
ShowYourStripes
“I work on trying to understand how our climate has changed over the last 200 years or so and how it might change in the future”
Ed Hawkins
Why did you choose to become a climate scientist?
I’ve always been fascinated by different aspects of science and as a kid I read a lot of popular science books. I actually started out as an astrophysicist, studying distant galaxies. And at the end of my Ph.D., I decided I wanted to do something a bit more down to earth and ended up retraining as a climate scientist.
Could you please describe the warming stripes and how they work?
The warming stripes are a very simple representation of how the climate has changed over the past 170 years. They represent changes in global temperature, using a series of vertical coloured stripes, one per year, representing the global or regional temperature in that particular year. Moving from left to right from the year 1850 up to the present day, each stripe is coloured by the temperature in that particular year. You see the colours change from dark blues to light blues to light reds, and then to the dark reds very recently, highlighting the rapid warming of our planet over the last 50 years.
Tammam/Ari & Lucy Photography
How did you come up with the idea of the warming stripes?
I wanted a way of representing the changes in climate as simply and as visually as possible, recognizing that, not everyone would have a scientific interest or background and therefore wouldn’t necessarily want to see traditional graphs and axes and numbers. And I chose to make the stripes using the simplest way that I could think of as representing changes in temperature, using blues to reds, to reflect on that natural feeling of what cold and hot is.
I think most people have an understanding of what’s going on about the climate change. You see it on the news all of the time, but it isn’t always made very local and relevant. Now we’re starting to experience the consequences more and more. And I think that’s making it more real for people because they are individually feeling the effects. We’re getting more heavy rainfall events. We’re seeing more intense hurricanes. Higher sea levels mean that places get flooded more than they would have otherwise done. We are experiencing climate change through the changes in extreme weather – that’s how we’re going to feel it.
Why is a visual representation of global warming a good idea?
We need to communicate to everybody that the world is changing, the world is warming, and that there are consequences of that change. But the changes are occurring over decades. And that’s very difficult sometimes for people to appreciate that things have changed on a relatively slow basis in terms of their lifetimes. So by highlighting and using visualizations and data to bring the message home that, yes, over your lifetime, things have changed. And I do remember having more snow as a child, and that is because the climate has warmed.
So we have a sense that things have changed. But to highlight that visually is really important to make people understand. If we are to meet the global targets that have been set, people are going to need to change their lifestyles and societies will need to change in a multitude of different ways. We have to bring everyone along with those changes.
We need to talk more about the opportunities of the changes, because we want to not just highlight that changes are needed, but actually we will end up in a better place. For example, by switching to electric vehicles and bikes and walking, first of all, we’ll be healthier and also there’ll be less air pollution, which will save millions of lives around the world and enable us to breathe properly again when we’re outside, improve our health, and therefore be less of a burden on the national health services around the world, but also allow us to connect more with nature as well.
Leipzig fürs Klima, Silvio Bürger
How will Earth change in the future, if we do nothing about global warming?
It is a big question. I think we are at a crossroads and we can either choose to turn left or turn right.
If we continue to burn fossil fuels and chop down the world’s rainforests, then global temperatures are going to continue to increase. The consequences we’ve already seen will just continue to get worse and worse.
Heatwaves will continue to get hotter. The extreme rainfall events will continue to get more intense. The coral reefs around the world will continue to struggle and end up dying. We will lose the ice around the Arctic in the summertime. All of these have consequences that we will face if we fail to act. And what’s really important, I think, to highlight is that if we don’t reduce our emissions, basically, to reach net zero emissions, the world will continue to warm and those consequences will continue to get worse. It’s not something just for our children and grandchildren’s to tackle. It’s here and now.
By getting to net zero emissions, we stabilize global temperatures, but they don’t cool down. To cool the global temperatures down we need to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. And that’s not something we know how to do on a very large scale. So until we invent a way of extracting large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, we can’t go back to the climate we’ve had in the past.
Temperature change in Kenya since 1901
Temperature change in USA since 1895
What are your hopes for the coming years?
I hope that we can, as a global society, come together and work together to address these challenges. Turn right instead of left and start reducing our emissions on a global scale, so that we can see our emissions coming down and global temperature rise slowing down and stopping over the next decades.
There are enormous opportunities for any people to invent new technologies, to build new companies based on sustainable ways of living and solve the problems that we face. It can spark a new green industrial revolution to ensure that we can provide society with the tools that they need, to live in a different way.
Temperature change in Greenland since 1901
Temperature change in United Kingdom since 1884
Are people ready to work together?
There is certainly a high level of understanding within every government. We have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. It produces these very large reports every eight years or so, which summarize the state of our knowledge about climate science. And at the end of that process, the summary of those reports called the Summary for Policymakers is read and agreed line by line by every single government around the world.
A part of the problem is probably short-term politics. People have to try and get elected every few years. So there are political challenges in implementing the changes that they recognize are needed globally.
Penguin Books
What role do companies play in climate change?
Companies have an enormous responsibility and they can realize enormous opportunities by inventing solutions. I think companies are also beginning to realize that consumers will choose companies that match their values. So if they’re acting in a sustainable way, then that will be an attractive company for people to look at buying products from and to work for.
At the same time we also need to ensure that the companies are given appropriate policy directions to ensure that they can change course. For example, the car industry has a very clear understanding that within a decade they will not be able to sell any petrol or diesel cars, certainly in the UK and probably over most of Europe and in other countries as well. So necessarily they are investing their money in designing electric cars because they recognise that there’s no point investing in any more petrol or diesel cars, because they won’t be able to sell any of them. So being given that direction by the policymakers means that they have to change their business and act differently.
What is important in your own private life?
I have a three years old son. And, obviously, we think about his future and the world that he’ll end up living in. I want to try and ensure that the world that him and all children grow up in is a world in which we have a more stable climate and that we are living in a better place.
Are you living a sustainable life and in what way?
I certainly do in many ways. I cycle to work. I cycle with my child to his nursery. I am almost entirely vegetarian. But I think it’s also very difficult to live an entirely sustainable life because the infrastructure is not necessarily there.
It is actually impossible or extremely difficult to be perfect. We can all improve, but I don’t think we should set perfect as the goal. We should all do better instead of aiming for a few of us to be perfect.
Do you have a goal for something you want to achieve in your life?
It’s a hard question. I would like to think that I have made a small contribution to changing minds and persuading people that these changes are happening and that we need to make some pretty serious changes to society to tackle it.
Explore other content
