Tomorrow is #ShowYourStripes Day – But we have the real one – Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts and Charles Rotter

According to several sources, #ShowYourStripes is a global campaign to spread awareness about climate change using warming stripes graphics. The iconic blue and red barcode will appear on landmarks, TV screens, magazines, and more as the world unites to show their stripes on June 21.

In essence, the world has gone nuts over this simple but misleading graphic. You can buy all sorts of merchandise to proclaim your stripe faith. For example:

This visual campaign was created by Professor Ed Hawkins to “start conversations about our warming world and the risks of climate change.” He’s done so, but like many climate alarmists, he’s only showing a tiny subset of earth’s temperature history.

Here is Hawkin’s stripes for the surface temperature record since 1850.

Looks ominous, right? Well that’s EXACTLY what they want you to think. This isn’t climate science, this is visual propaganda for armchair climatologists aka climate activists.

Two can play at that game. Now, let’s have a look at some stripes we created on a much longer time scale.

Lest you think we are doing something that is not “climate narrative approved” I’ll point you to these examples that have been done at Columbia University, University of California Santa Cruz, and University College, London.

The point of our Cenzoic Stripes is to show that it has been MUCH warmer in the past, and in the near present cool period we actually run the risk of falling into another ice-age. Note that in our Cenzoic Stripes above, we are in a cool period when geologic timescales are used. If we were to plot the few decades of surface temperatures in Ed Hawkins stripes on our Cenzoic Stripes at the far right, it would be so small a blip as to be invisible in the graphic. Ed’s stripes campaign suggest and support the conceit that humans can be in control of Earth’s temperature, if only we’d do something.

And here is the same Cenzoic stripes with Oxygen 18 benthic isotope data plotted on it that comes from Hansen et al., 2008. Note all of the Earth events that have been labeled.

Feel free to distribute these liberally, pun intended.

H/T Mumbles McGuirck