A striking new visualization made by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather unfurls like a flower blooming in the spring, its colors moving from blue to red. It may look beautiful but what it reveals is an alarming picture of a heating planet.

The graphic shows the increase in daily global temperatures between 1940 and the end of 2024 compared to the period before humans began burning huge amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels.

It paints a stark picture. As the data spirals outwards, it becomes redder and redder as global temperatures ramp up.

Good visualizations can make climate change “more visceral and understandable,” said Hausfather, the climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth.

Charting the evolution of global temperatures over the past 85 years makes it “crystal clear how rapidly the planet has warmed over the past few decades, and how worryingly hot both 2023 and 2024 were compared to any prior years,” he told CNN.

Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, breaking a record set just the year before. It was also the first calendar year to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a critical climate threshold.

Scientists have been struggling to fully explain the extraordinary heat of the past few years. While it has been driven predominantly by burning fossil fuels and the natural climate pattern El Niño, these factors alone don’t entirely explain the unusually rapid temperature rise.

What scientists are clear on, however, is that every fraction of a degree the world warms, the worse the effects will be for humans and ecosystems, including more frequent and severe fires, storms and floods.

“Global warming has accelerated in recent years and poses a major threat to our livelihood and to the natural world if we do not take action to reduce emissions,” Hausfather said.