Show Your Stripes
No, this is not an e-mail from Netflix. This is still ‘Sunny climate stormy climate’, your newsletter about climate change. And we are (for the 100th time) going to talk about how it’s getting hotter. And this strange looking image will help.
I wrote earlier about why this summer was expected to be exceptionally hot.
It did feel like that to me. I spent the earlier part of the summer in Bangalore and we had to put on ACs for the first time in the 4 summers that we have spent there. I was in Mumbai in May and the electricity bill for the month for our 2 bedroom house was a whopping 9k! This is almost 50% higher than the previous highest, which was 6k last summer. And my husband came back after spending a couple of days in Delhi last week, complaining that it was impossible to step out of the house even in the evenings as the temperatures continued to be higher than 35 degrees late into the evening.
It feels like its getting hotter, but wonder how much hotter?
This image of stripes shows the temperature change from 1875 to 2023 for Mumbai.
These ‘warming stripe’ graphics are visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in a particular country, region or city over the past 100+ years. Each stripe or bar represents the temperature in that country, region or city averaged over a year.
The blue lines are years that are cooler than the 1961-2010 average and the red years are the one that are warmer.
This graph that plots it on a scale should make it amply clear that over the last 3 decades the temperatures have only been getting warmer and at an alarming rate!
These warming stripes were designed by Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading) to start a conversation about climate change and the impact it is having.
21st June is Show Your Stripes day
Show Your Stripes Day is a global movement to share our concern about how the climate is changing and the need for urgent action through this powerful visual representation.
The stripes have also been important for striking up global conversations. In the past, on this day, they have been displayed in a wide range of prominent public spaces, from Times Square, New York, to the While Cliffs of Dover, UK. By displaying the stripes in locations worldwide, people have been inspired to download and share the stripes online and help spread their message.
What can you do?
Show your stripes!
You can download the stripes for your own country or city here
You can share the image or recreate the stripes in your own fun way and share it on your social media/ profile picture to start a conversation about climate change!
Here’s my little creation for Show Your Stripes day!
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