Last year, climate researcher Zeke Hausfather was playing around with climate-data visualizations, trying to find new and shocking ways to show just how fast Earth is warming. He was brainstorming ideas with an artificial-intelligence tool and getting it to code and create them quickly. Together, they made innovative tree-ring-style plots with the months of the year around each ring, the annual circles growing outwards with time and the colours showing temperature. Then Hausfather asked the AI tool: what if these plots were 3D' The result was what Hausfather calls a thermal helix animation, showing temperature spiralling upwards through time into a shape reminiscent of a tornado (see 'A new view'). In a world in which most people have seen the classic 'hockey-stick' graph of rising global temperatures, it is a refreshing graphic: compelling and beautiful. And, despite being a competent coder, Hausfather had no idea how to make it on his own. Hausfather, a researcher at the climate...
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