Why XKCD's Earth Temperature Timeline is Such a Good Online Graphic

/update

I was so struck by this climate graphic. Randall Munroe always does a great job with these and this graphic in particular really captures what a departure recent, industrially driven climate change is from past, natural climate variation. There are some good lessons here for anyone doing online science communication and data visualization.

[godminnette]

In case you're wondering why this is being promoted now: Randall Munroe is partnering with the Minute Physics crew for an adaptation of his What If? book scenarios into YouTube videos. The third video releasing caused all three to really hit the algorithm stride, and now a bunch of other content around Munroe, XKCD, and What If are being pushed. That's what I've noticed, anyways; several talks with Munroe have been showing up in my recommended as well.

[xlerb]

Part of the impact of that graphic is you keep scrolling down and down, the little dotted line wiggles around a bit but doesn't ever move all the much, then all of a sudden at the end boom! That does such a good job of communicating that this thing is not like anything else over that entire span of time because it's built up an expectation that the line doesn't move that much then shatters that expectation (And yes, this just showed up in the suggestions feed, probably because I've recently watched a few XKCD videos).

[therookiegamer]

the hover text on this is great, especially with the context of the line at the top (when people say "the climate has changed before, " these are the kinds of changes they are talking about)
the hover text reads: [after setting your car on fire] listen, your car's temperature has changed before

[briankelly]

Would love to see the updated chart since it has been 7 years.

[apollyon]

xkcd should have a science communication award. If it has one already give 'em another one.

[shlok]

please link that graphic in the description

[captianmorgan]

But after you show someone this then they bring up 'but it was warmer when the dinosaurs were around!'. Stuff just keeps moving. Eventually they'll probably get to 'but at time=3 minutes the Universes temperature was 10^32 Kelvin!' (Assuming they're not a YEC.)

[pmsteamrailroading]

For me, the issue is: if the global climate change people are wrong, so what?!

We end up with cleaner air and water.

We still have oil for making fertilizer, and lubricants down the road.

Lots of people have jobs in renewable energy.

I don’t see the downside.

[BartBe]

Post pandemic, we became wiser on the value of absolute knowledge about scientific topics.

[aaronhuertas]

Why are people commenting on my 7 year old video? Did someone assign it in a class or something?

[mr-boo]

It’s a great graphic and I don’t want to take away anything from it. But they hockeystick graph has been around forever in various scrollable forms to give this sense of scale of change. The bigger issues are echo chambers, this sense of contrarian superiority and a general rejection of the mainstream. Once people start rejecting the mainstream information because “that’s what _they_ want you to believe”, get continuous confirmation of misinformed ideas using arguments that do take some expertise to disentangle, and obtain a sense of superiority over others because of “having escaped the sheep matrix”, it’s very hard to pull them back. Especially via the internet, where they may never see mainstream information again or choose to not engage with it other than to sneer at the “sheeple”.

I’m genuinely interested in what we can do to have us be more open to more sides of a story and to be more humble in how we hold all our limited views. Feel free to respond with your ideas! I’ll be happy to take/discuss them :)

[joshuasims]

What i love about this graphic is the linear scale, one box is 100 years, all the way down. Log scale would make sense in a scientific paper but like you said, this is a web native graphic, and takes full advantage of that fact. The consistent time scale makes the effect of modern climate change apparent to any reader.

[Oxxyjoe]

there is another dotted line that isn't represented on this graph, there at the end. Along with the three which are represented, there is an even more extreme heating-up scenario, wherein human beings actually find ways to burn more resources and generate even More heat than ever before. While it may seem like the spiking has happened already, it could also be yet to come. Even more reason to pump the brakes and re-learn everything having to do with energy production.

Imagine that there is a ship, whose captain is steering the ship leftwards (in relation to the end of the graph here). So this insane captain who only sees red, who only insists on more and more, is the driving force of this present industrialization crisis. But of course, who am I to say? I am but one invisible member of the life on this planet.

[asheep]

Enjoy the random resurgence of your video!

[dustycarrier]

While I see the point that's being got at here, the problem with this argument is that all major climatic shifts and temperature changes happened rather suddenly and rapidly, and climatic changes are generally measured on far larger time scales. There's also significant concern over the accuracy of the data used for older time periods, where it may often be the case that extreme weather events are not included in averages or even at all, but modern data collection methods allow us to actually consider those. Worse still, is some significant concern with regards to the quality of modern climate data which is concerningly often poisoned by data that is clearly not collected properly (IE temperature sensors placed in places that will necessarily give inaccurately high result such as in a place where a lot of reflective heat exist).

And keep in mind, when I say that "extremes may not be included" I do not mean that they are smoothed out, I mean that the data is effectively removed from consideration. This is important to note. My worry is that the historic data is built from geographically deposited averages, but the modern data is not, but we happily intermingle the two with little consideration to the fact that geographic deposition of such temperature data may bias towards the average.

[reidflemingworldstoughestm]

~2300 BCE: a Stone Henge monument so small that it was in danger of being trod upon by dwarves was completed.

[Jonas-Seiler]

I would like to take this opportunity to urge everyone to stop thinking about how to make cars eco friendly and instead start thinking about how we can get rid of cars entirely

[AlanTheBeast]

This couples very nicely to the Pump Handle videos put out by NOAA. Thanks for posting about this. Another arrow in my quiver for the deniers.

[Relkond]

Neat, the graphic starts where the temperatures were colder than present. Buut, what happens if you rewind further and start where temps were warmer than present?

[CrashingPotatoEngineer]

As a 90s kid my response to the beginning is X-Force number 4 was ahead of its time