Red indicates a higher average temperature than the previous year; blue the opposite.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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I hate when they don't include info on how to READ easily-shareable images like this. Put it in the PICTURE, science communicators! OP is in the minority here by providing the source.
Red indicates a higher average temperature from the previous year. Blue is the opposite.
I'd just have thought they had some absolute scale going. It's a relative scale. This can lead to wildly wrong conclusions. Not in this case as the message would be the same mostly, but still.
Relative scale is worse. Not only that the temperatures keep going up and aren't a fixed "red", but that there's few to no blues now, meaning it's always going up everywhere. And this is actually a more calming way to present it that the usual exponential spike chart.
We need a color that's more alarming than red to switch to next
The temperatures are relative to the 1961-1990 average for that region, from the HadCRUT5 dataset.
Edit: I'm just going to find out if it's relative to the average, or just lowest value is blue, highest is red.
The footnote detailing this is maybe a little unclear.
Also by Ed Hawkins: The climate stripes
Thanks for pointing it out, I'll add it in the description right away.
Oh no, I hope you didn't think my criticism was directed at you! You linked the source....most others would not. I'm mad at the writers who include these images and graphs without a key.
/image of Bush pointing at graph with no marked axis
I'll complain even further. What is even pictures of ? And what is the horizontal axis?
I thought the horizontal axis was clear - it's each year. Each row is a decade
Yeah, but what are the pictures? Are they supposed to show the geographical globe or are they pixels of each day of that year or something?
Sure, the overall point is very clear, but it's generally good practice to label everything. It's not that I don't believe the data, it's just... What am I even looking at?
It's average annual temperature for that area compared to the average of 1961-1990.
That's what I was originally saying. The image doesn't TELL us anything, just shows us colors
Are we looking at the same source?
Blue is lower than the average for 1961-1990 while red is higher.