Animation Shows How Global Warming Is Spiralling Out Of Control

A new graphic that compresses 166 years of data into just 15 stunning seconds of animation, showing how speedily global warming is whizzing out of control, has hit the viral button.

It has been made by Ed Hawkins, a British climate scientist from the University of Reading. He created the graphic to show how the average temperature has altered since 1850.

Check it out in the Climate Lab Book.

At first, the animation displays tight spirals in the center of the image. After that, it expands slowly outward, beginning in the 1940s, and then rapidly shifting to the 1990s.

"The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades," Hawkins wrote on his blog, the Climate Lab Book.

Using data from the Hadley Centre of the United Kingdom's Met Office, the animation shows the average monthly global temperature departures and pits them against a baseline of pre-industrial temperatures, ranging from 1850 to 1900, showing alterations in Celsius.

The reasons for the climate changes are clear---the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas in the past century has released carbon dioxide as well as other greenhouse gases into the air, leading to a rise in global air and sea temperatures, to levels that cannot even be worked out or explained by natural "variability."

While the last couple of years have set a record for the "warmest year" on record, 2016 is gearing up to exceed the record.

Last December, the Paris Agreement was approved. It targeted slowing down the rise in greenhouse gases, to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F), compared to pre-industrial levels, by 2100.

Hawkins said that the new animation showed the link between the current global temperatures and the desired target. "The animated spiral presents global temperature change in a visually appealing and straightforward way," Hawkins wrote. "The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades."