An Update to a classic

The original “Climate Inaction Stripes” graphic was designed by: Peter Gericke, Marius Hasenheit, Tadzio Müller, Wiebke Witt, and is available at https://sustentio.com/2022/climateinactionstripes-virale-klimakommunikation

Tadzio Mueller posted my version of the update here:
https://steady.page/de/friedlichesabotage/posts/b583b7fd-65f1-4f5d-83a1-a468f7e621a4

… and on BlueSky. E.g. (https://bsky.app/profile/tadziomueller.bsky.social/post/3m5im2l45pk2s).

How it was made

Took the CO2 data from NOAA: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html

Took the warming stripes from: https://showyourstripes.info/

Took the dates / events from a post by Tadzio Mueller (https://bsky.app/profile/tadziomueller.bsky.social/post/3m5giurpi7k2f), and checked them in google. Added the COP30 date

Sanity Checks

I used the “Warming Stripes” from Ed Hawkins and the University of Reading, from the website: https://showyourstripes.info/

I got the CO2 data from NOAA: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html using the “co2_daily_mlo.csv” csv file. This gives the CO2 levels, although the data only gave it from 1974. I applied some smoothing (roughly 12 month running average) to get the smoother line without the saw-tooth edges.

… and then for the Warming stripes, I zoomed in, to the Warming stripes image, to just get 1975 to 2024.

Given that we are mid November, it looks super unlikely that 2025 (at this level of accuracy) will be different from the 2023 / 2024 colours. That is a bit of an assumption.

And then after creating the graph, do an extra overlay to check that everything is lining up.

Now compare it with the original from https://sustentio.com/2022/climateinactionstripes-virale-klimakommunikation, as posted by Tadzio Mueller. Pretty good.

And the original / new, side by side

There are some differences. The Original went back a decade earlier. The NOAA data I used, only went back to 1975. The new one includes up to 2025 (note that 2025 is provisional, but unlikely to change, as we have data up to mid November, projections for the rest of the year, and at this granularity the colour is likely to stay as is). In the side-by-side image above, I squished the new one to get it to overlap the original. Overall I’m happy with the results.