See How Climate Change Has Impacted Your Area Using Warming Bands
The earth has been heating up for decades, but changes from year to year are difficult to observe in real time. Was this winter really less snowy than usual? There is now a handy way to see how the average annual temperature in your area has changed over time.
The tool is called Show Your Stripes and it displays the average temperature for each year as colored bars. (The data for most countries cover the period 1901 to 2018.) You can draw stripes for the country, and in some places also for the regions. In the US, you can get stripes for each state.
They all show a similar story: lower temperatures at the beginning of the century (represented by white or blue stripes) with occasional reds. Closer to modern times, there are much more red stripes. The image at the top of this post refers to the Earth as a whole; some regions are warming more than others.
The data comes from the Berkeley Earth temperature dataset, and the instrument was created by British climatologist Ed Hawkins. People are sharing images online with #ShowYourStripes tags to discuss how the climate crisis has affected their neighborhoods. And if you want even more localized graphics, research meteorologist Jared Rennie has created a version that can give you temperature or precipitation bands for any county in the United States .