Yesterday evening I gave a talk about data visualization to Periodic Tables, a Science Cafe run by Misha Angrist. It was a lot of fun! Amongst other things, I made an animation of the NOAA Daily Sea Surface Temperature Graph from the other week. Here it is:

Here’s the static graph.

We're fucked

Global mean sea surface temperature 1981-2024

And because the hardy perennial of whether, for the sake of honesty and not Lying With Graphs, you should always have your y-axis go to zero also came up, I made a zero-baseline version of the average temperature graph.

For all you zero-baseline fans

Mean global sea surface temperature with a zero baseline on the y-axis

I’ve added these to the Github repo. In making the animation, I found a nice little wrinkle that let me put a ticking version of the year in the title even though year is not the frame_along driving the transition_reveal() that makes the animation. If I get a chance I’ll write this up separately.