page_title: Climate spiral
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Climate spiral / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: A colored line graph depicting global average temperatures for 1850-2016. Vertical scale is temperature Horizontal scale is month Color of graph line is year Source states: "Technical details: Monthly HadCRUT4.4 global temperatures referenced to ‘pre-industrial’ (defined as mean anomaly from 1850-1900, which is 0.31°C below 1961-1990), plotted using the viridis colour scale to indicate year. ... "
context_page_description: A climate spiral is an animated data visualization graphic designed as a "simple and effective demonstration of the progression of global warming", especially for general audiences.
  The original climate spiral was published on 9 May 2016 by British climate scientist Ed Hawkins to portray global average temperature anomaly since 1850. The visualization graphic has since been expanded to represent other time-varying quantities such as atmospheric CO₂ concentration, carbon budget, and arctic sea ice volume.
context_section_description: Hawkins credited a "Friday afternoon" email from Norwegian climatologist Jan Fuglestvedt for the idea of converting a conventional coloured line chart into a spiral, and thanked Fuglestvedt's wife, Taran Fæhn, for having suggested it to Fuglestvedt. Fæhn, a researcher for Statistics Norway and the Oslo Centre for Research on Environmentally Friendly Energy, had suggested that connecting December to the following January would show temperature evolution in a more dynamic way. Ensuing email discussions refined the design of the climate spiral, which Hawkins published on Monday 9 May 2016.
caption: Before climate spirals: A non-animated, non-spiral line chart (April 2016)[9] depicts the same data as the first climate spiral graphic that was published the following month. (Horizontal axis shows months; changing line colours denote the passing years.) Brad Plumer wrote in Vox that the graph "makes clear how staggeringly, anomalously warm 2015 and 2016" had been,[10] a phenomenon reflected in the spiral graphic where it "appears to burst outward toward the end of the animation".[1]
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