Cooking up the Climate Stripes, with Ed Hawkins
About this episode
The episode features a discussion with Professor Ed Hawkins about his Climate Stripes graphic and its impact on climate communication.
In this episode of Totally Cooked: The Climate & Weather Podcast, hosts Iain Strachan and Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick sit down with one of the world’s most recognisable climate communicators: Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. Ed is the climate scientist behind the now-iconic Climate Stripes, a deceptively simple graphic made of blue and red bars that tells the story of global warming at a glance. First published in 2018, the stripes visualise more than a century of rising global temperatures, with each stripe representing the average temperature for a single year and shifting from cooler blues to warmer reds as the planet heats up. The Climate Stripes have travelled far beyond academic journals. Downloaded more than a million times within days of their public release, they’ve appeared everywhere from social media campaigns and fashion to projections on famous landmarks, helping people around the world understand climate change without needing a single axis label or number. In this conversation, Ed explains how the idea emerged from a desire to communicate climate data more clearly, why the stripes resonated so strongly with the public…
People in this episode
Hosts: Iain Strachan, Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick
Guest: Professor Ed Hawkins
Topics covered
- climate communication
- global warming
- data visualization
- extreme weather
- climate science
Keywords
- Climate Stripes
- global temperatures
- climate variability
- data visualization
- climate change
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Reading, UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science
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