You may have noticed the warming stripes created in 2018 by climatologist Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in Great Britain, and it reminds us of product barcodes in some ways.

Yes indeed, we can call this line graph a barcode, just climate barcodes used to describe the long-term trend of air temperature. Each colored line represents the average air temperature for a particular region for a year. The lines are plotted in chronological order to show changes in air temperature over time.

The color of the Ed Hawkins line depends on whether the region’s annual mean temperature is above (red) or below (blue) the long-term average observed for the period 1971-2000. The air temperature data in this graph comes from various sources, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (USA), the United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UK), MeteoSwiss (Switzerland), Deutscher Wetterdienst (Germany), Météo-France International (France) and Obtained from Swedish Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (Sweden), Berkeley Earth Laboratory, etc.

We can review the Ed Hawkins lines for the territory of Uzbekistan based on the following app. According to it, the average value of air temperature across the republic has increased by 1.5oC in the last 120 years. The rising temperature trend has been particularly significant in the last 20 years.

The Hawkins lines serve as the iconic logo of climate change or global warming today.

For example, at the COP26 summit held in Glasgow in 2021, these lines representing the climate trend were one of the main topics that almost covered the conference. Climate activist Greta Thunberg used Ed Hawkins lines to represent global temperature change in the cover of her book The Climate Book, while members of the UK’s Reading Football Club are expected to play on football pitches across the city of Reading wearing Hawkins lines.

For reference, the image in this article represents Hawkins’ global temperature curves. Source: https://showyourstripes.info/s/globe