Amazing graphs that show human dominance on earth

The numbers are not Lie: Humans are destroying this planet. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the temperature of the oceans are increasing. Arctic sea ice and biodiversity levels are declining – and no, the increasing number of chickens does not count against biodiversity.

To understand and solve those problems, scientists and policy makers need data – real numbers that show how A smart man It has changed almost the entire earth in one way or another. To that end, a team of researchers has released the Human Impacts Database, or HuID, which contains more than 300 critical pieces of information (so far), from sea level rise to the amount of calories we as a species get from animal products.

“Getting the numbers straight is the first step to understanding these systems, and we can learn a lot just by looking at the numbers,” said Rachel Banks, a biophysicist and leader of the Caltech and Chan Zuckerberg BioHub. Authors of a paper describing HuID published today in the journal Styles. “And certainly, we want to update these numbers and grow the database, but we also want to try to better understand the Earth’s systems.”

It’s worth your time going to the database and poking around. Banks and her colleagues sifted through all kinds of data sources, from scientific papers to government reports, to try to find differences in everything from measuring atmospheric processes to energy use to mining. But if you spend enough time with HuID, you’ll find patterns. Earth systems, after all, are intimately interconnected. “We thought to us that there were two key narratives that emerged and how they connected the story,” said study co-author Rob Phillips, a physicist at Caltech and the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub. “One of them said: What shall we eat? And another: Where do we get our water from? And then the last one is about power. If you follow the three threads, it’s a big, big part of the story.”

I got lost in HuID for hours. Along with the report’s graphs showing their progress over time – I’ve pulled out 14 particularly powerful, important or downright surprising indicators that help illuminate those three threads.

First and foremost: global warming

Thanks to humans overloading the atmosphere with too much carbon, global temperatures have been rising steadily since 1850, as shown in the graph above. They are now 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times. That’s sneaking up on the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goal of keeping temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and well below 2 degrees. But it’s important to note that we’re talking about global averages—so some places are warming faster than others. For example, the Arctic Ocean is warming 4.5 times faster than the global average, because as it loses more sea ice, the dark water underneath absorbs more of the sun’s energy.

High sea levels, from two angles

As temperatures rise, ice melt accelerates, raising sea levels (shown in the graph above is an average of millimeters above sea level since 1900).