Shift In Climate Normals Due To Global Warming

I was curious how much climate normals have shifted in the past few decades, so I put together some gifs looking at that.

Data

I used the CRUTs data set for this.

Methodology

• Take the min temperatures
• Average them for each month from 1956-1966 and from 2006-2016
• Plot them for selected months using contour plots with 5 degree (C) contours
• Convert the plots to gifs

Results

I selected January for all gifs except for the one zoomed in on Australia. Doing every month would make this take forever to download. Thus, this is how cold it was at night in January unless otherwise specified.

The way to read these is to see how the lines and colors shift. Areas that get bluer are getting colder. Areas that get redder are getting hotter. The order is in the legend, and it's blue->green->yellow->orange->red from coldest to hottest.

First up is the world:

It's a bit hard to read since there's so much going on, so I separated out areas. Here is Europe:

Here is Asia:

Here is the US:

Here is Australia. Note that this is using July temperatures so it's looking at the winter like the other zoomed-in gifs:

Conclusions

You see a pretty clear shift in these, and the trend basically everywhere is towards hotter temperatures. This is especially impressive to me because it's only 50 years. It's insane to know that how it feels outside can change so much in a single lifetime, but it has...