📊 EV’s Charts of the Week #84

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. Every Wednesday, I do this in Charts of the Week.

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DEPT OF CLIMATE

After this week’s record temperatures across much of Europe, including the UK, it is worth looking at the long-term trends. The UK has the longest-running regular temperature records, dating back to 1659. The chart shows the average annual temperature as recorded. The green trendline shows a 25-year moving average. It is pretty clear that there is an upward trend since the 1900s and an accelerating upward trend since the mid-1970s.
The long-term average up to 1971 is substantially lower than the long-term average since I was born (the upper horizontal line). And recent years have been above that level.
We track some of the key climate metrics in the Sunday newsletter every week. Here’s the latest.

A huge outlier
Rob Thompson visualises just how far out of the normal distribution Tuesday’s heat event in the UK was.

Source: Rob Thompson 

Global warning
Land temperatures are rising faster than sea surface temperatures.

Source: Berkeley Earth via Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf

Holy cow
CO2 (carbon dioxide) and CH₄(methane) are both GHG (greenhouse gases), but their impact on the warming of the planet is different. A new source of methane produces about 28x the heating effect of CO2, but a constant source of methane doesn’t have a significant effect on warming. We should definitely make efforts to reduce methane emissions, but those efforts are pretty much useless without addressing CO2.

Source: Oxford Martin School

DEPT OF GENDER EQUALITY

As a new WEF report about the Gender Gap has come out, I’ll take you through what I’ve been seeing, inspired by Alice Evans. She’s an incredible voice on gender, with among others an analysis of the patriarchy going back 10,000 years.

Means to what end
Countries with a higher GDP aren’t necessarily those with the highest gender parity. In fact, there seems to be a gender parity middle-class made up of lower-income countries.