warming stripes [but 1d]

Just recently, I came across this representation of the (global) temperature rise over the period 1850-2020, made by Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It is powerful, artsy, reminding me of the Everything mural in the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick, and visually most appealing, as a poster about the urgency for action, but it nonetheless remain a poor statistical graph in that it is a 2d presentation of a 1d dataset, the time series of the yearly average temperatures, missing the opportunity to exploit the second axis by eg taking a stripe of the Earth from South Pole to North Pole or the daily temperature throughout the year. And it is also lacking a scale, not only by omitting the dates on the first axis, but also by choosing an arbitrary if dramatic colour range [unable to incorporate the so-far ultimate 2023?!] (And with the visual appeal comes the danger of turning it into yet another marketing gimmick, hence cancelling its message.)

Burning through the frozen south [and happy new year!]

j’adôre la bagnole [not!]

back to the future [no need!]

A news entry in Nature of 25 Sept 23 is reporting on the grim period of Earth, 250 millions year away! By that time, continents will have drifted back, reunited into a new Pangaea supercontinent, Pangaea Ultima, which is likely to form around the equator, producing a deadly place where most life will go extinct. As happened 200 years ago. While grateful for the item of information that continental drif is thus cyclic, I find rather ironical that one worries about the extinction of life so far in the future, when it is likely to happen within a few decades!

fusing simulation with data science [18-19 July 2023]

In collaboration with the Met Office, my friend and Warwick colleague Rito Dutta is co-organising a two-day workshop in Warwick in July on the use of statistics and machine learning tools in weather prediction. Attendance is free, but registration needed for tea breaks.