'Climate Time Machine' – NASA visualisation shows planetary changes

Despite climate change warnings issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990, global emissions have continued to rise in the past decade, reaching their highest point in history.

The result: Global emissions are on track to blow past the 1.5C warming limit envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement and reach 3.2C by century’s end.

The global average temperature has already warmed 1.1C above the pre-industrial average. And scientists expect the annual average could be anywhere between 1.1C and 1.7C warmer up to 2026 – meaning there’s a chance we could pass the 1.5C warming threshold in the next five years.

By the end of the century, without aggressive climate action, global warming is forecast to reach approximately 2.8C.

NASA’s ‘Climate Time Machine’ offers a stark illustration of the trends, showing how global temperatures and CO2 concentrations have risen since industrialisation, while sea ice cover is falling and sea levels are rising.

A colour-coded map shows the progression of changing global surface temperatures from 1884-2022, with dark blue indicating cooler than average and dark red indicating warmer than average.

Another visualisation shows how the global distribution and variation of C02 concentration observed by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the NASA Aqua spacecraft over a 20-year timespan.

A graphic then shows the mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet rapidly declining due to surface melt and iceberg calving, based on observations from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites (2002-2017) AND GRACE follow-on (since 2018).

NASA says the findings indicate that between 2002 and 2021, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.8mm a year.

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