The Art of Insight

Chapter 1Unruly Stripes

with Ed Hawkins

Figure 1.1: Ellie Highwood's global warming blanket

Elliehighwood / https://elliehighwood.com/2017/06/12/climatechangecrochet-the-global-warming-blanket/ / last accessed Febuary 16, 2023

There are no absolute truths, there is nothing Good, Bad, True, Beautiful, or Just in itself, but only relatively, evaluated according to a clear and distinct plan […] Think in terms of action, and base your actions on the effects they will have.

—Michel Onfray

On June 10, 2017, Ellie Highwood, then a climate physics professor and Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Reading (UK), tweeted out an image of a blanket she had been working on over weekends: “Ok so I am a crochet addict. This is my ‘global warming blanket’ ‐stripes coloured according to last 100 years T anomaly” (Figure 1.1).

“Anomalies” are departures from a common baseline, which in this case was the mean world temperature between the years 1900 and 2000. In Highwood's blanket, which encompasses the 1916–2016 period, blue and green hues represent years when the mean world temperature was below the average of the 20th century, while pink, yellow, and red stripes correspond to years when temperature was above that average. Read from top to bottom, the blanket reveals a pattern of constant warming. Figure 1.2 is based on a similar data set.

Two days later, surprised by the ...