Happy Nice Mall

21 June is Show Lines Day.

As with warming streaks, streaks are a popular way to visualize global warming trends over the past 150 years.

You’ll find warming strips on face masks (see fig. my twitter profile), in scarves (Blackrock CEO Larry Fink wore a scarf around his neck in Davos a few years ago), in buildings (Scottish power company teleported them to a pile of a coal-fired power station that was about to be scrapped) , one in Leipzig, Germany Bridge, a rock band album cover.

Each strip represents the average temperature for a year. Ribbons are available for every country in the worldbased on average annual temperatures for that country as well as for each state in the United States. In most cases, you will see the lines change from blue to red.

Where did these lines come from? How did they become so common?

I posed the question in January to Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England, who is credited with uncovering the strips. The story unraveled is an object lesson in how human creativity can spread.

Hawkins got the idea in June 2017 when she saw a baby blanket crocheted by a college colleague, Ellie Highwood. She used global average temperature data from 1916 to 2016 and every color yarn she had available. It was a gift to a child of her climate scientist friends.

He called it the global warming blanket. “Trying to come up with color combinations is so hard, so geeky!” wrote on twitter.

His tweet flew. Thus, Highwood is a blog post about. Hawkins made a graphic for his post using what Highwood calls more image-friendly colors. It starts with purple to represent global temperatures in the mid-19th century, moving from pink to orange to marigold yellow at the end of the 21st century.

“The blanket was made with love for a friend’s baby,” Highwood told me this week. “It was never intended as an invention for a climate communication graph.”

It turned out to be arguably the most effective climate communication chart.

“I’m really glad Ed is imagining how these could be used in a much bigger way than I thought,” he said.

Highwood’s creation did not appear out of nowhere. It is based on a long tradition of warmth blankets, where each row represents the average temperature of a particular day, or sky blankets, where each row represents the color of the sky on a particular day.

Therefore, it was not surprising that another scientist at the other end of the Atlantic Ocean had a similar opinion. In November 2015, Joan Sheldon did what she calls “”.global warm scarf” She asked for 400 rows for her scarf. So he used average annual temperatures of 400 years: blues are cooler than normal, reds are warmer than normal, and purple is for normals because “I like purple, as you’ll find out if you visit this blog a lot!” Wrote.

This is where the story gets a little steamy. Sheldon, who studies estuaries at the University of Georgia, said he learned of Hawkins’ warming lines in 2018. reached with a comment on a blog and never heard from again. “I believed he probably found this independently after me, and people popularized his version because it’s better known in the meteorology and climate science community,” he said in an email this week. He said he was “discouraged” for a while.

Hawkins said Sheldon only learned about this last month when he sent an email.

Hawkins first used the warm-up strips in a speech at the Hay Literary Festival in 2018. She said she wanted to convey the reality of warming to an audience that wasn’t here for science. Then she put it online.

She changed the palette Highwood used for her blog from purple to yellow. In its current version, the 1850s begin with mostly dark blue stripes, occasionally dotted with pale blue, indicating a year warmer than average. In the middle of the image you get more pale blues, then gold, then red. “It seemed more intuitive to use people’s perceptions that blue is cold and red is hot,” he said.

American meteorologist Jeff Berardelli saw the lines online in 2018 and urged other meteorologists to use them on the June 21 summer solstice. #ShowYourStripes The hashtag was born. In 2021, Hawkins was invited to London fashion week, which featured several striped dresses by Lucy Tammam. She says she never dreamed of attending a fashion show.

“It’s great to see people take this symbol and get so creative with it,” he said. “We have a lot of conversations in our groups, in our tribes. The more conversations we start in different groups, the better. Lines can help.”

The baby, for whom Highwood knitted a blanket, is now 5 years old. Her mother, Jennifer Catto, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, sent a picture from Twitter.

Beginning in the late 1970s, you will notice that the bands have made a sharp turn towards yellows and then reds, reflecting the significant increase in global average temperatures. It was dark red last year. How dark lines will be at the end of this century It depends on whether the world as a whole will continue to pump more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

So the color scheme is entirely up to us. And yes, it takes creativity.

“Our choices determine what happens next,” Hawkins said.

Important news from The Times

More resilient polar bears: New research suggests that small groups of animals Survive longer as the Arctic warms.

Logging a rainforest: A Times reporter’s 500-mile voyage on the Congo River has uncovered widespread illegal timber harvesting in India. a vital place to slow climate change.

95 tons of methane per hour: Using satellite measurements to measure emissions of gas that warms the planet, researchers found that a mine in Russia “greatest resource we’ve seen”

Arrested activist: The trial of Vietnam’s foremost environmental activist and others has cast doubt on the country’s future. coal cutting commitment.

Flooding in Yellowstone: Record levels of rainfall and mudslides in the national park have forced thousands of visitors to evacuate the area. extreme weather It affects other parks as well.

A new legal argument: Environmental groups have sued the federal government for issuing oil and gas drilling permits without considering what the emissions will be like. harming endangered species.

Grand Master Trash: Artist Duke Riley turns marine plastic into works of art to denounce its environmental impact. Yes, tampon applicators are there.

from outside The Times

• French authorities banned outdoor activities in some areas and started importing electricity as air conditioners were turned on. a record heat waveAccording to the BBC.

• From the Associated Press: Australia’s new government committed to reducing emissions 43 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

• In 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a memo stating the need to develop new energy sources to prevent climate change. nobody listenedThe Guardian reported.

• As wildfires rage, California is struggling to recruit federal firefighters. The reason the Los Angeles Times finds is to punish the study matched with low pay.

• South Korea’s new government to be formed expand the use of nuclear energy To meet climate targets, according to Bloomberg.

• The Washington Post covered the last known “Fernanda”.fantastic giant turtle“A species long thought to be extinct until researchers found it in the Galapagos.

Before you go: Sleepless summer nights

Many people struggle to sleep well in the summer. Warmer, longer days make it harder for our bodies to slow down, as Rachel Rabkin Peachman, a reporter for Ask Good, explains. And the world, as you know, is warming more and more. But there are tips to make it better, like dimming the lights an hour or two before bed and cooling your bedroom. More advice here.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back on Tuesday.

Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill, and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward.

Contact us climateforward@nytimes.com. We read every message and reply to many!