December 22, 2010 — andyextance

As a science writer, I’m constantly battling against those occasions on which words fail me. Perhaps I don’t explain an idea clearly enough, or maybe I just can’t figure out what to say. Well, over 100 blog entries into Simple Climate, I’m actually going to (kind of) shut up for once. Throughout the year there I’ve been able to include some great illustrations explaining climate change, from how it works to the temperature changes we’ve gone through. This week I’m rounding some of them up here, along with some other diagrams I thought were powerful that I haven’t included before. Have a look – I hope they get your thought processes going as much as the normal entries do.

The animated movie of the spread of ice loss into northwest Greenland observed by satellite from 2003 through to 2011. The colour scale along the bottom shows ice thickness in centimetres with the black colour reached in the south at the end of the animation representing an 80 cm loss.

The above video was first published on this blog in this entry. I’ve also published several other illustrations of how Arctic ice has retreated.

The above image was first published in this blog entry.

The two images above are were originally published by the UK’s Met Office in July. I’ve also published another diagram illustrating sea level rise this year.

All four of the above images effectively illustrate the same blog entry. I’ve also included other diagrams showing sea temperature trends, trends in record temperatures in the US, average global annual temperatures for January-July, April, March, 2010 and 2009 overall. Plus I used the infamous “hockey-stick” graph showing how current temperatures compare to those seen over the past 1,000 years here.

Original image and reference to source in this post, plus I also published another diagram showing the forcing effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

I first included the above image in this entry on the blog. I’ve also published diagrams illustrating how carbon cycles between CO2 and other uses in nature, and how important this is for the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I’ve also published diagrams showing how another chemical cycle important to the climate, the water cycle, is being affected by climate change.

The above image was first published on this blog in this entry. I’ve also published graphs illustrating emissions from power sources and transport, how emissions are exported and have also published other blog entries covering projections of future CO2.

The above image was first published on this blog in this entry.

This image was first published in this blog entry. The importance of this kind of warming is demonstrated by a diagram in this blog entry explaining why coral bleaches with higher temperatures. Other adverse effects of temperature include the staggering number of budgies that died in a heatwave shown in this entry, and how lizard populations are changing shown in this entry, and areas where researchers predict humans will eventually not be able to live due to the heat, shown here.