record temperatures recorded in 2023 make the colors of “warming stripes” obsolete

We will have to find other colors to account for the evolution of climate change. The red palette of “warming stripes” is no longer sufficient to illustrate the phenomenon.

The year 2023 was the hottest on record globally. And this is already making the colors of the “global warming bands” obsolete. If we speak, in French, of global warming bands or stripes, we often call them, in English, “warming stripes” because they were designed by a British climatologist. It is therefore a kind of barcode with colors ranging from blue to red which can be defined as visual representations of the change in temperature since 1890.

These charts can be edited for any country for which temperature data exists. Each column represents a year. When the average temperature is below the 1970/2000 reference average temperature, the column is blue. When it is above, the column is more or less dark red. And since 1900, the columns have been increasingly red.

Add colors

For the moment the graph stops at 2022. There is no 2023 column but with the temperature records for 2023, the red palette is no longer sufficient to account for the evolution of climate change. We will have to add colors: brown, purple, or gray… We don’t know yet. Ed Hawkins, the creator of this graphic, who is a climatologist, did not expect to have to modify his color code so quickly, only six years after launching the concept.

In a press release published on Wednesday, January 3, on the website of the University of Reading in Great Britain, to which he reports, he admits to having himself been surprised by the temperature records for the year 2023. It must be said that unfortunately , the planet is quickly approaching the 1.5 degrees of the Paris agreement. In 2023, the hottest year in history, the world lived with a climate that is on average 1.48 degrees warmer than in the pre-industrial era. This is probably unheard of in 100,000 years, says the European Copernicus service on climate change.

Ocean surface temperatures also reached “unprecedented” levels fueled by the return of the El Niño phenomenon. All this while at the same time, still according to Copernicus observations, concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly from human activities, also reached new records in 2023.