Images of climate innovation
Show your stripes
These 'climate stripes' show the scientific reality of our warming world. Each stripe represents a year, ordered from 1850 to 2020, with the colour indicating the average global temperature in that year. Shades of blue represent cooler years and red, warmer years. This stark visual starts conversations about our warming planet and has been used worldwide as a symbol of the unfolding climate crisis.
Climate change is a complex issue for society to understand and respond to. These climate stripes provide a stark, simple, and visual message that the world is warming by translating scientific data into an easily accessible format that transcends language and needs almost no context to explain it.
The Show Your Stripes website (www.ShowYourStripes.info) provides similar climate stripe graphics for every country, allowing anyone to see and share their own stripes which chart the recent climate history of their own corner of the world.
If we want climate action to become the demand of a mass movement then we need the topic to become a conversation we have everywhere, whether it be over the fence to our neighbours, on television shows, or while dancing at festivals.
These simple graphics have already helped start those conversations and will continue to start many more.
Entrant: Ed Hawkins , University of Reading
Copyright: Ed Hawkins
Funding: National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
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