Show Your Stripes Day highlights global and local warming

An illustration of the earth's warming temperatures over the period 1850-2023 as of June 21, 2024, also known as Show Your Stripes Day. The initiative is meant to raise awareness about climate change. (Credit: showyourstripes.info / Professor Ed Hawkins, University of Reading_

It's the seventh annual Show Your Stripes Day. The initiative is designed to help visualize human-caused warming around the world.

The warming stripe graphics show the change in temperature (relative to the 1961-2010 average) for cities and countries around the world.

The darker the red, the further above average and the blues get darker as temperatures fall further below average.

These are the stripes for Edmonton. The left side of the image is 1850, with 2023 at the far right.

There are definitely warmer than average years in the left and middle parts of the image, but there's a wider band of reds and pinks in more recent years.

That's a bit easier to pick out with the bar graph image below.

Again, you see some warm years early in the timeframe (left and middle side of the image). Then, we have a cluster of warmer than average years in more recent history and the cooler than average years (blue bars) almost completely disappear.

The image below is the warming stripes for Canada as a whole.

Clearly, not every region is warming at the same rate as the increase in temperature is much more noticeable for Canada than it is for Edmonton.

Globally, the warming trend is even more striking.

The images below are the warming stripes and warming bars for the entire planet.