Originally published at: NASA's animated "climate spiral" visualization really drives home how quickly global temperatures are rising | Boing Boing
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Holy cow.
I’m betting that was done after January 20, 2021.
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Fake News /s
On a far more serious note, we’re pretty much fucked.
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Mesmerizing and sad, at the same time.
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Spiraling out of control. (sorry)
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The animation makes it clear that human activities have increased global temperatures over time.
Just to be clear, the graph only demonstrates that global temperatures have increased over time. The graph does not provide a causal correlation to human activity.
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Nicely done visualization.
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Username checks out…
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See also this from 5 years ago:
(I don’t control the onebox size)
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Well I just want to say I’ve sincerely enjoyed my time here on the Titanic with you all and you’re all lovely, I wish any of us was in power but I’m assuming we’re not. I will continue to recycle my plastic and try to enjoy my time left on this pale blue dot with you before it all goes boom. 
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Just change the scale from +1 degC to +10 or +100 degC and then we can kick the can down the road some more.
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But the graph in the OP does not, in fact, tell us anything about the human causes of climate change (the XKCD image above, with the much longer t-axis, suggests how you can do that graphically).
Regardless of @StatusQuo’s intent (and I wouldn’t assume posters here are climate-change deniers), this seems like an appropriate place to be accurate about evidence.
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Very pedantically speaking, that’s true. In the same way, the famous video of dropping a hammer and feather on the Moon doesn’t demonstrate anything about gravity, because you can’t see the force involved…in theory it could have been magnetism or something. In practice, though, we all know where the motion is coming from.
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Correct. My only statement is that this graph does not imply a causal correlation to human activity. This is too important of a topic to be loose with evidence.
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You ruined his house, he gets your pool.
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well, if you want to be pedantic: that graph shows no evidence at all. it’s just a representation of evidence, really a representation of measurements - without appropriate context: it’s completely and totally meaningless.
part of that context of course is that anthropogenic sources is the cause, and we need to act now before we are completely and totally screwed
it’s too important to even pretend by implication that climate change is anything other than our fault
it’s all part of the context implied by nasa in making this animation
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[ETA: As someone with a basic understanding of recent human history and major geologic events, and as someone who thinks about media literacy] I’m willing to operate on an assumption that correlation is enough to work with here.
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I can’t believe I’m jumping into this fray, but the only information in the animation is temperature and time. The animation shows that the warming is real over time, but that’s all.
Other, similar animations showing industrial CO2 production, global manufactured goods by ton, etc., would show the correlation to human activity. And then we’d go from there to causality.
Of course we know that industry expanded over that period, but that’s not what’s shown here.
