Professor Ed Hawkins’ data visualisation, Warming Stripes!
It started at Hay Literary Festival. Professor Ed Hawkins was trying to find a way to communicate climate change to an audience that might not be able to interpret scientific graphics or data.
Those stripes — shades of red and blue representing hot and cold temperatures — chart temperature changes from 1850 to 2018, running from left to right. They look like a bar code, albeit a vibrant one with a serious message. Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, says that the impact was immediately obvious.
That data visualisation was based on local temperatures for the festival’s location in rural Wales. Since the 2018 festival, Hawkins has worked on a graphic for global temperatures. Most recently, it took centre stage at a very different festival: as the backdrop for Enter Shikari’s set at Reading.
On 21 June 2019, the summer solstice, he launched a website where users can view and download climate stripes for the cities they live in, from Vienna to Verona. So far there have been more than a million downloads.
Warming Stripes from 1850-2020 for GLOBE / Europe / Asia / North America.
The ferries that once shuttled tourists to and from the little islets in Iran’s Lake Urmia sit rusty, unable to move, on what is rapidly becoming a salt plain.
Just two decades ago, Urmia was the Middle East’s biggest lake, its local economy a thriving tourist center of hotels and restaurants.
Lake Urmia’s demise has been fast. It has more than halved in size – from 5,400 square kilometers (2,085 square miles) in the 1990s to just 2,500 square kilometers (965 square miles) today – according to the Department of Environmental Protection of West Azerbaijan, one of the Iranian provinces where the lake is located.
There are now concerns it will disappear entirely. Such problems are familiar in many parts of the Middle East – where water is simply running out.
The region has witnessed persistent drought and temperatures so high that they are barely fit for human life. Add climate change to water mismanagement and overuse, and projections for the future of water here are grim. Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food self-sufficiency.
By Frederik Pleitgen, Claudia Otto, Angela Dewan and Mohammed Tawfeeq, CNN
