How Rapidly We Are Burning?

Back in May, Ed Hawkins shared his spiral climate GIF animating the rapid nature of global warming. This visualization made waves across the web as it communicated the threat of climate change in a way that people could better understand. Much to his surprise, it was recently featured in a segment addressing the effects of global climate pollution during the opening ceremonies of the Rio Olympics. Inspired by his GIF, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Australian-German Climate & Energy College  recently created two new climate spirals. The first one animates how the world has burned through the trillion-ton global carbon budget since 1850. The second one illustrates the growth of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the last 150-plus years as a result of GHG emissions. These GIF’s essentially demonstrate that we may pass the 1.5 degrees target by 2025 set during the Paris climate talks last fall. Despite how quickly this is happening, Malter Meinhausen (Director at the Climate & Enregy College) asserts that we can tackle this issue by focussing on building and transitioning towards renewable energy.  

Movie2_3SpiralsWithLines from Climate Energy College on Vimeo.

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