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Global Temperature Trends
How 2016 became Earth's hottest year on record
Of the 17 hottest years ever recorded, 16 have now occurred since 2000. The chart above is my recreation of a wonderful graphic from the New York Times, featured in the article, "How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record". Thanks to publicly available data from NASA we can plot recorded temperatures by data going back to 1880. Once visualized we can clearly see temperatures climbing and increasingly rapidly in the past 2 decades.
Warming stripes
Reduced to just one dimension, the warming trend becomes more obvious. Each stripe here represents the average temperature for a year. You’ll notice that the stripes take a sharp turn toward the yellows, and then reds, starting in the late 1970s, reflecting the significant rise in global average temperatures. Last year was a dark red. How dark the stripes get by the end of this century depends on whether the world as a whole keeps pumping more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
Paris
Replacing fossil fuels is becoming easier. But temperatures are still likely to rise too far. Global CO2 emissions need to be halved by 2030 to limit global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Original graphic from the New York Times
