There are several new and novel ways to illustrate the warming of the planet and climate change using dynamic visualizations and animations based on data collected over decades of climate monitoring. Here is a sample of a few that have gained prominence recently. These visualizations do not need many words to explain or to understand.
Global Warming Bubbles
The Global Warming Bubbles visualization shows the annual temperature departure from average broken down by country. The baseline is the average from 1951 to 1980. Created by Antti Lipponen, a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. See www.washingtonpost.com/… and earther.gizmodo.com/… for some more info.
Temperature Circle
Similar data as above in a different visualization created a year ago by Antti Lipponen.
Warming Stripes
“Warming stripes” are a new set of climate visualizations using color to display the long term rise in temperatures for particular locations. Each stripe represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to now. Created by Ed Hawkins, climate scientist in the National Center for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) at the University of Reading. Think of it a simple, effective and artistic color bar code for a city, country or a region. See www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/… for more info.
In the image above, the temperature range is 1.35°C.
Climate Spiral
Ed Hawkins is also the creator of the famous “Climate Spiral” visualization, which rose to prominence couple of years ago. A version was even used in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics. Here is an updated spiral. Follow the link in the tweet for an interesting article and links to other uses of this technique, e.g., www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/...
Another visualization of historical temperatures by Robert Rohde -
The 2018 Heat Wave
Summer Temperature Anomalies
Geographical display of average summer temperature deviations since 1880.
The Aerosol Map
The following is a map of aerosols — suspended particles (dust, ash, soot, sea salt, ...) and liquid droplets in the atmosphere, created from data gathered by several NASA satellites and sensors on the ground. Red represents soot, purple shows dust, and blue is sea salt.
Climate Reanalyzer
Another good resource -
These visualizations may or may not help convince your conservative friends that global warming is real and that human activity is a major contributor to it, but they do help keep the citizenry informed using simple, intuitive and visually striking displays, which are easier to understand than graphs and charts.
P.S. I forgot to add the Climate Spiral to the poll below. Please use the “Other” option to vote for Climate Spiral.