A striking new visualization created by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather unfolds like a blooming flower, its colors shifting from blue to red. While visually stunning, it depicts a concerning trend of a warming planet.
The graphic illustrates the rise in daily global temperatures from 1940 to the end of 2024, compared to the period before humans began burning massive amounts of fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. The image paints a grim picture, with the colors deepening into red as global temperatures continue to climb.
According to Hausfather, the climate research lead at Stripe and a scientist at Berkeley Earth, effective visualizations help make climate change “more visceral and understandable.” Charting global temperature evolution over the past 85 years, he says, “makes it crystal clear how rapidly the planet has warmed in recent decades and how alarmingly hot 2023 and 2024 were compared to any previous years.”
Last year marked the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous year’s high. It was also the first calendar year to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a critical climate threshold.
While the extreme heat of recent years has been mainly driven by fossil fuel emissions and the natural El Niño climate pattern, these factors alone cannot fully explain the sharp rise in temperatures.
What is clear, however, is that each fraction of a degree the planet warms makes the effects more devastating for humans and ecosystems, bringing more frequent and severe fires, storms, and floods.
“Global warming has accelerated in recent years and poses a major threat to our livelihoods and the natural world if we do not take urgent action to reduce emissions,” Hausfather warned.
