Climate Change Data

Watercolor and Colored Pencil, 2015

Climate Change Data uses multiple quantities: the annual decrease in global glacier mass balance, global sea level rise, and global temperature increase. I wanted to convey in an image how all of this data must be compared and linked together to figure out the fluctuations in Earth’s natural history. One of the reasons scientists study what happened in the past is to understand what may happen now as a result of human-induced climate change. I represented this by illustrating that glaciers are melting and calving, sea levels are risings, and temperatures are increasing. The numbers on the left y-axis depict quantities of glacial melt and sea level rise, and the suns across the horizon contain numbers that represent the global increase in temperature, coinciding with the timeline on the lower x-axis.

References:  http://wxshift.com/climate-change/climate-indicators/sea-level-rise

http://blogs.agu.org/fromaglaciersperspective/2015/08/20/disastrous-year-for-north-cascade-glacier-mass-balance-snowice-economy/

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/noaa_nasa_global_analysis_2015.pdf

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/10/3631632/climate-change-rate/

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/causes-of-sea-level-rise.html#.VuBEzIwrKqQ