By Chris Davey
Last month I shared a photo of my decorated pasta bowl. This month it’s my new socks.
Now I try to avoid buying “stuff”, including clothing, as everything has a carbon footprint, and I do have plenty of socks – some of them are even in pairs. But I just had to buy these…
They depict the Climate Stripes as devised by University of Reading climate scientist, Professor Ed Hawkins, each stripe representing a year, with the average global temperature graded from dark blue through to dark red, for obvious reasons:
So it’s a simple, accessible depiction of how the mean temperature of the Earth has increased since half way through the 19th century, and successfully conveys the message that we’ve been warming gradually and then more recently, faster. Sadly, much faster since the 1980s when we should have had more sense, as that was when we knew for sure that “global warming” was a thing.
Here’s a version that shows the increase in a more familiar format, that of a graph:
So I’m glad I discovered the socks, thanks to a post on X/Twitter. How about getting your feet into some of these socks and flashing them on Show Your Stripes Day, Friday 21 June 2024.
It’s a great example of a simple piece of communication that is accessible and informative. The trouble with climate scientists is that they talk like, well, scientists. Of course they do, and choose their words carefully, using accepted terminology, saying what the evidence is telling us; and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But their message can at times seem inaccessible, so devices for aiding communication are useful.
It’s a central tenet of the Climate Majority Project, of which (as regular readers will know!) I’m a big fan, that we should tell the truth on climate breakdown – the central truth being that the 1.5C rise in temperature (compared with pre-industrial times), as enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is already history. We are so near that marker and emissions are still rising, so that target is effectively dead, and we are heading for 2C, which is quite a bit worse.
By coincidence, I also discovered this month, in the spirit of truth-telling, a selection of comedians committed to making the serious findings of climate scientists accessible by translating them into English. These “translations” manage to make a very serious subject accessible – but just a word of warning, if swearing offends you, maybe best to give this a miss.
Scientists featured: (so you can check out their work separately if you wish)
Joanna Haigh
Fredi Otto
Mark Maslin
Bill McGuire
Comedians:
Kiri Pritchard-McLean
Jonathan Pie (Tom Walker)
Nish Kumar
Jo Brand
Thanks to Climate Stripes at Reading University for the images.
