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Things change when you’re not paying attention. Your hair grows, you start liking wine, and the temperature begins to rise. Over the last 100 years, the Earth’s temperature has, slowly but surely, increased. 

We’re now looking down the barrel of a global increase in temperature of 1.5°C by 2030. This will impact every ecosystem on the planet. Is it too late to fix it?

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This project was realised with the help of a City of Adelaide Arts and Cultural Grant.

The climate stairs at MOD. are a small part of a much larger international project. It all started with data from the Berkeley Earth data set. This is a free resource that can help us to understand the way that our Earth has changed over time.

Climate Stripes like these were first popularised by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading in 2016. Ed used this data to create the first visualisation of temperature variation by using simple red, white, and blue stripes. Each of these stripes represent a certain amount of temperature variation. The darker the blue, the cooler the variation. The darker the red, the warmer the variation. Black is not good news. 

Show Your Stripes day is now a global phenomenon. On the 21st of June each year, people share images of how temperature has changed where they live, advertising the dangers of the climate crisis. But what does this data show?

Climate change is the biggest and most obvious issue facing the future of Australia. The temperatures will change. There will be shifts in rainfall patterns. There will be more natural disasters and extreme weather events. Our ecosystems will be forced to change. We don’t yet know the extent of the change, or how much we will have to adapt. But we do know that there needs to be changes from the personal to a global level to reduce emissions and adapt to the change in climate.

None of this is probably new information to you, and can be really scary! But you don’t need to sit alone with your despair. Countries are making change. The global Climate Strikes have mobilised millions of people across the planet. People are moving, and you can join them.

 

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