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Comment by iDon | Hacker News Reader

Representing that as a "climate spiral" would make it unnecessary to adjust for the seasons, and the original data could be used instead of a statistical view. It makes it easy for anyone to see the trend. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_spiral - https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/visualizing-daily-global-t... - https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/spirals/

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The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.

Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.

So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.

It would be easy to adjust the radius so that the area increase is proportional to the temperature increase.

It would be, but humans are famously bad at judging relative areas at all, which is a problem for data visualisation everywhere.

0° is not zero. Your premise would be true if we were using the Kelvin temperature scale.

No, this has nothing to do with which temperature scale is being used.

This is measuring change in degrees from a baseline.

Polar coordinates are such a nice way to visualise periodic data.

They often are not, because they highly distort shape and size. Values that are smaller than the mean occupy much less space (area-wise) and seem less significant than they really are, while values that are larger than the mean occupy much more space (area-wise) and seem more significant than they really are.

Thanks. Those are much better than the graph trash in the original article.

Though the graph is ten years old. Why is it so hard to find recent data? :-(

This is the most recent version I have found:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5190/

this is incredible graph work (despite the bleak subject)

The final rotation around the horizontal axis was brilliant.

These are nice if you are scientifically literate but I suspect not so great for the lay

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