As a new year begins, there are many stories about how much global heating has occurred over the past year.
An image represents something, often a real-world object or scene, while a graphic represents data or information.
Following are some recent graphics that illustrate increasing environmental damage.
So sure, human-caused global warming is happening. But there are harder questions. How fast is it warming, exactly? Is the ocean warming faster than the rest of the planet? How has warming affected other parts of the environment, like sea ice?
Below, you’ll see a few charts showing monthly climate data over the past 40 years. Here’s the game:Draw yourguess foreach month of 2023. When you’re done drawing, you can compare your guess to the real data.
Can you guess how crazy last year’s weather was? Try this game by Harry Stevens, The Washington Post, Jan 3, 2024
You can play this game yourself at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/global-heat-sea-surface-temperature-records/
For example, I really underestimated how much higher global air temperatures were for 2023.
NASA Climate Spiral 1880-Present
- Released Wednesday, November 15th, 2023
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
- Visualizers
- Mark SubbaRao (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- Ed Hawkins (National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading)
- Scientist
- Gavin A. Schmidt (NASA/GSFC GISS)
- Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Science support
- Peter H. Jacobs (NASA/GSFC)
- Web administrator
- Eytan Kaplan (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
Datasets used in this visualization
- GISTEMPID: 585ModelCollected with GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP)NASA/GISS
Global Warming from 1880 to 2022
Earth’s average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York reported. Full story: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3246/na…
See How Hot 2023 Was in Two Charts. Hint: Record Hot. Month after month, global temperatures didn’t just break records, they smashed them. This year could be even warmer.
By Raymond Zhong and Keith Collins, The New York Times, 1/9/2024
Thousands of U.S. homes have flooded over and over again.
‘What we are seeing is flooding is increasing faster than we are mitigating our risk,’ one analyst says of data from the National Flood Insurance Program by Brady Dennis and Harry Stevens, The Washington Post, January 9, 2024
Photography
It can be true that one picture (a photograph for example) is worth one thousand words. One of the reasons I take and share so many photographs is to try to help people appreciate the beauty that is being threatened and lost as a result of our global environmental crises. (See: Jeff Kisling Photography).
People who know me have heard, over and over again, how the vision of this photo I took (circa 1970) triggered me to live without a car because I didn’t want to contribute to the pollution that might hide the mountains. Ironically, the more recent, more severe forest fires have sometimes done that. Those fires are also related to environmental damage.
Ansel Adams is probably the most widely recognized photographer in the American conservation movement. (See: Ansel Adams: The Role of the Artist in the Environmental Movement). He said, “Photography is a language.”
Here he writes of his arrival in the Yosemite Valley.
“That first impression of the valley—white water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the Sierra…was a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916 my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra.”
See the Top 10 Most Influential Nature Photographers of All-Time on the Richard Wong photography website.
(Barry) Lopez could not have known the effect he was having on one impressionable member of the audience. Yet I believe he established a connection with me that evening—a thin strand in the elaborate web that is community—by describing a path that was utterly new to me, and by suggesting that, as others had walked that path, it was safe for me to do so as well. This all happened in the space of a few seconds, as he mulled over the central question plaguing the men and women at the conference, namely: How could we convince lawmakers to pass laws to protect wilderness? Lopez argued that wilderness activists will never achieve the success they seek until they can go before a panel of legislators and testify that a certain river or butterfly or mountain or tree must be saved, not because of its economic importance, not because it has recreational or historical or scientific value, but because it is so beautiful.
His words struck a chord in me. I left the room a changed person, one who suddenly knew exactly what he wanted to do and how to do it. I had known that love is a powerful weapon, but until that moment I had not understood how to use it. What I learned on that long-ago evening, and what I have counted on ever since, is that to save a wilderness, or to be a writer or a cab driver or a homemaker—to live one’s life—one must reach deep into one’s heart and find what is there, then speak it plainly and without shame.
Reid, Robert Leonard. Because It Is So Beautiful: Unraveling the Mystique of the American West . Counterpoint. Kindle Edition.
Polycrisis Center 