I assume this community and others like it on other instances are going to be just like the sub Reddit. Sensationalised data presented in a terrible way.
Before anyone jumps on me - I’m not saying the world isn’t heating up.
I hate when they don’t include info on how to READ easily-shareable images like this. Put it in the PICTURE, science communicators! OP is in the minority here by providing the source.
Red indicates a higher average temperature from the previous year. Blue is the opposite.
Oh no, I hope you didn’t think my criticism was directed at you! You linked the source…most others would not. I’m mad at the writers who include these images and graphs without a key.
I'd just have thought they had some absolute scale going. It's a relative scale. This can lead to wildly wrong conclusions. Not in this case as the message would be the same mostly, but still.
Relative scale is worse. Not only that the temperatures keep going up and aren't a fixed "red", but that there's few to no blues now, meaning it's always going up everywhere. And this is actually a more calming way to present it that the usual exponential spike chart.
The temperatures are relative to the 1961-1990 average for that region, from the HadCRUT5 dataset.
Edit: I’m just going to find out if it’s relative to the average, or just lowest value is blue, highest is red.
The footnote detailing this is maybe a little unclear.
Yeah, but what are the pictures? Are they supposed to show the geographical globe or are they pixels of each day of that year or something?
Sure, the overall point is very clear, but it’s generally good practice to label everything. It’s not that I don’t believe the data, it’s just… What am I even looking at?
Technical notes: this graphic uses the HadCRUT5 dataset with ‘average’ defined as 1961-1990. The map for 2023 is based on January to September only; all other years are annual averages with at least 6 months of data available for that location. White areas show where not enough data is unavailable.
Blue is lower than the average for 1961-1990 while red is higher.
Add comment