Climate Scientist, Ed Hawkins: We all experience climate change through extreme floods or heat waves or wildfires, and nowhere is safe.
I’m Professor Ed Hawkins. I’m a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the UK.
What you see now are the Warming Stripes, which represent the changes in global temperature of the planet from 1850 up to the present day, one stripe per year, with blues for colder years and reds for hotter years. You see very clearly the change of colors highlighting the very rapid warming of our planet, especially over the last 50 years or so. The reason we see that rapid warming is purely because of our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels and deforestation.
So on the 21st of June every year, we have our “Show Your Stripes Day,” where we encourage people from around the world to use this graphic and talk about climate change. We have weather forecasters using these graphics, buses painted with the stripes, rock bands using them at festivals. I’ve seen the pope with a stole, colored with the stripes.
The future of the stripes is not yet written. We can make choices today, which will stabilize global temperatures and mean that the stripes don’t get even darker. It requires individuals to make different decisions about how they live their lives. It also requires companies and industries and politicians to be brave enough to take the difficult decisions. We all need to have these conversations to talk about the risks we face and the choices we're making to respond to those risks.
I would just love to see the visitors to MoMA take this graphic, use it in a creative way, share it with your family or friends and I would love to hear about the conversations you have.