So, I don’t get as many chances to do public communication of climate science as I’d like and its made a bit trickier for me here in Austria as I think (probably correctly) that my German is not good enough to be clear and authoritative on the subject, and that bothers me.

Anyway I came across Ed Hawkins blog about participating in the Hay Festival – at which he says “The Festival had paired up three environmental scientists with three artists and authors to produce a series of hour-long live events, and provided us with an opportunity to talk about science with a very different audience.” And I think its pretty awesome! Go and have a read/look/listen on his blog …

I think such initiatives, making the message about climate change and our responsibility for it beautiful, accessible, stimulating, hopeful, fun and inspiring is the way we have to go.

I really love Ed Hawkins visualizations, for example, the one below shows annual global temperatures from 1850-2017, with the colour scale representing the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C [data]:

Even more along the lines of data-to-art is the work of Jill Pelto, for example this one using uses measurements from 1980-2014 of the average mass balance for a group of North Cascade, WA glaciers:

Gorgeous, right? You can buy prints of these type of paintings from Jills Etsy website.