A hotter year, again

This year, 2023, was the hottest year on record. For Reuters, Gloria Dickie, Travis Hartman and Clare Trainor highlight the rising temperatures and the bad stuff that follows.

This year’s added warming has been like pouring gasoline on a fire. Extremes became more extreme. Warmer ocean waters fed stronger storms. Heatwaves persisted for weeks instead of days. And wildfires, feeding on dry forests and high temperatures, burned out of control.

An El Nino climate pattern, which emerged in the Eastern Pacific in June, is making things worse, scientists said. It’s boosting the warming caused by climate change, unleashing more catastrophic extremes.

Temperature extremes are still worth highlighting, but there are only so many ways to show an increase over and over again. Maybe someone can make a global warming exhibit that starts at the temperature highs of the 1800s and very quickly increases temperature to current highs. Throw in some VR with storms and wildfires.

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Retrofitting old British homes to improve energy efficiency

Speaking of old homes and energy efficiency in the UK, The Economist describes renovations that can help reduce energy usage, which is of heightened interest to the British government because it’s footing £40bn of citizens’ energy bills.

They include this small chart on energy efficiency by type of home and when it was built. It took me a second to separate the numbers on the right from the bars on the left, but I eventually got there. The Economist’s self-imposed space constraints for their charts must be fun to think about.

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Managing temperature fluctuations through UK architecture

Philip Kennicott, Simon Ducroquet, Frank Hulley-Jones and Aaron Steckelberg, for The Washington Post, tour the evolution of UK architecture and temperature control:

Last summer, staff members at Hardwick Hall, a historic Elizabethan landmark in Derbyshire, were keenly aware of the excessive heat. The house, built during a period of exceptional cold known as the Little Ice Age, is a masterpiece of British architecture. With its glittering array of tall windows, it was vulnerable to the cold, but key design elements made it surprisingly efficient at managing the climate of its day.

As you’d expect, money plays a big role in the changing efficiencies.

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Timelines for record temperatures

Speaking of the heat wave in Europe, Pierre Breteau for Le Monde charted record high temperatures using a step chart for each weather station in France:

These graphs represent, for a part of the 146 stations for which Météo-France provided us with the data, the level of the most extreme temperatures ever recorded and their date.

The data are fragmentary because it is difficult to go back beyond the 1990’s, or even the August 2003 heat wave, and only those with a historical record of at least 20 years are shown below.

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Climate spiral to show temperature change

Say what you will about circular visualization, but the spiral plays. This one from NASA shows global temperature change over time:

The visualization presents monthly global temperature anomalies between the years 1880-2021. These temperatures are based on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4), an estimate of global surface temperature change. Anomalies are defined relative to a base period of 1951-1980. The data file used to create this visualization can be accessed here.

This is based on Ed Hawkins’ chart originally from 2016, but watch to the end for some extra sauce.

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Days since record-high temperatures

Here’s a fun/alarming weather map from The Pudding. Using data from the Applied Climate Information System, they show the number of days since a record-high temperature in hundreds of U.S. cities. The counters are in the style of those signs in factories that show days since the last injury.

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All-time temperature records broken in 2021

Using data from NOAA, Krishna Karra and Tim Wallace for The New York Times mapped all-time temperature records set in 2021. Red indicates an all-time high, and blue indicates an all-time low. Circle size represents the degree difference from the previous record.

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Mapping the probable heat around the world

Earth is getting warmer, and the previously abstract concept seems to grow more concrete every day. Probable Futures mapped increasing heat, decreasing cold, and shifting humidity under different warming scenarios.

You have the global view shown above, and then when you zoom in enough, you can click on grid cells for the model estimates. Dots on the map point to a handful of short stories on how warming has changed daily life, which I feel like could use more attention.

Next to the zoom navigation buttons is a camera button, which lets you download the view that you’re looking at. This feature is probably new to me but has been around a for a while. I like it.

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Historical context for the heat in the Pacific Northwest

It’s been hot in the Pacific Northwest the past few days. NYT’s The Upshot plotted the temperatures against previous max temperatures since 1979. Hot.

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Low temperatures map of the United States

Based on data from the Global Forecast System, The New York Times mapped the lowest temperatures across the country between February 14 and 16.

The blue-orange color scale diverges at freezing, which creates a striking image of a very cold country. The dotted lines and temperature labels make the patterns especially obvious.

As someone who lives in an orange area, I was shocked by all of the blue. Stay safe.

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