Arguments
Cooking up the Climate Stripes, with Ed Hawkins
Posted on 20 June 2026 by BaerbelW
June 20 is "Climate Stripes Day" across the world and the creator Ed Hawkins of this iconic graphic recently talked with Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Iain Strachan on their "Totally Cooked" podcast about them.
From the video's description:
In this episode of Totally Cooked: The Climate & Weather Podcast, hosts Iain Strachan and Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick sit down with one of the world’s most recognisable climate communicators: Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. Ed is the climate scientist behind the now-iconic Climate Stripes, a deceptively simple graphic made of blue and red bars that tells the story of global warming at a glance. First published in 2018, the stripes visualise more than a century of rising global temperatures, with each stripe representing the average temperature for a single year and shifting from cooler blues to warmer reds as the planet heats up.
The Climate Stripes have travelled far beyond academic journals. Downloaded more than a million times within days of their public release, they’ve appeared everywhere from social media campaigns and fashion to projections on famous landmarks, helping people around the world understand climate change without needing a single axis label or number. In this conversation, Ed explains how the idea emerged from a desire to communicate climate data more clearly, why the stripes resonated so strongly with the public, and how visualisations like the climate spiral (another of his widely shared creations) can make complex science instantly understandable.
But this episode goes beyond the stripes. Ed also discusses his research into climate variability and extreme weather, his work with the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, and the Weather Rescue citizen science project, which recruits volunteers to digitise historical weather records from handwritten archives. Together, these efforts help scientists extend the climate record further into the past, giving us a clearer picture of how quickly our climate is changing, and why communicating that change effectively matters more than ever.
Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals.
Thanks for sharing the story! It's such a great tool for helping anyone "get it." Some requests from someone who works with aging populations, folks with disabilities and other sensory processing differences:
-I think it would be a great exercise to make a "climate stick" that uses tactile cues to make the same point. The stick would start quite smooth on one end, and get progressively rougher as the climate warms. Perhaps the climate spiral would also translate into a stick by stretching it into an increasingly thick stick as the climate spiral gets wider and wider.
-For those with severe visual limitations, in addition to a climate stick, perhaps an auditory version by playing with the volume, amplitude and tonal qualities of the global climate representation? It would be interesting to give this task to some musicians to see how compelling and listenable they could make it, because it would be easy to make it increasingly grating, but a challenge to make it all listenable all the way to the present...
-other modalities: how about a room where you could sit in a chair and feel increasingly warm wind blown at you? Or increasingly bright lights? Or increasingly loud tone? Or heavier and heavier rate of raindrops? So many creative directions that this could go...