June 21, 2025 marks the eight annual Show Your Stripes Day – an event dedicated to growing global awareness about human-caused climate change and turning the climate conversation into action by using and sharing the famous “warming stripes” visualization using the hashtag #ShowYourStripes. But how did these stripes originate and what is the real meaning behind them?
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Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, the “warming stripes” are visual representations of annual or monthly temperature anomalies for a specific location or region over the past 100+ years. The visualization uses a color scale to represent temperature deviations from a baseline average, typically spanning several decades.
In the warming stripes visualization, each stripe or bar represents a single year or month, and the color of the stripe represents the temperature anomaly for that specific time period. Blue shades indicate cooler temperatures or negative anomalies, while red shades represent warmer temperatures or positive anomalies.
Impressed by people’s reaction to the stripes, Hawkins, who is Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading and principal research scientist at the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), decided to simplify the visualization, arranging the stripes in a horizontal sequence and simplifying the color pallet to create a visually striking pattern that allows for easy interpretation of temperature trends over time.
Since then, warming stripes have gained popularity as a way to communicate complex climate data in a visually appealing and accessible manner, providing a concise and intuitive representation of temperature changes.
On June 21, 2025, Hawkins launched the eight annual campaign ‘Show Your Stripes‘ – a day to encourage people around the world to replicate the powerful image and share it on social media using the hashtag #ShareYourStripes.
Find your country’s chart here.
‘Off the Scale’
In January 2024, Hawkins said global temperatures were so hot in 2023 that the latest warming stripes image needed updating, requiring a darker red color. “The colours used in the climate stripes are based on a scale designed to show which years are warmer and cooler than the average. 2023 was off the end of the scale,” the scientist said at the time.
But then came 2024 – shattering the previous record and bookending a decade of record-breaking heat. 2024 was 1.60C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level, the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded the 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris Agreement.
2024 saw its hottest boreal winter (December 2023-February 2024), boreal spring (March-May) and boreal summer (June-August) on record, a new record high for daily global average temperature, and an average of 41 additional days of “dangerous heat” worldwide.
In 2024, greenhouse gases saw their highest annual atmospheric levels ever recorded.
The burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity and heat is the single-largest source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the primary drivers of global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising Earth’s surface temperature. Global fossil fuel consumption has more than doubled in the last 50 years, as countries around the world aim to improve their standards of living and economic output.
CO2, a by-product of burning fossil fuels, biomass, land-use changes, and industrial processes such as cement production, is the principal anthropogenic greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, responsible for about three-quarters of planet-warming emissions. Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have increased by more than 60% since 1990.
So far, the world has warmed by 1.3C compared to pre-industrial times, though data by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that 20-40% of the global human population live in regions that, by the decade 2006–2015, had already experienced warming of more than 1.5C in at least one season. According to the UN body, every 0.5C (0.9F) of global warming will cause discernible increases in the frequency and severity of heat extremes, heavy rainfall events, and regional droughts.
Featured image: Ed Hawkins/University of Reading.
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