Project Writeup
If Climate Change Is Global, Why Doesn’t It Feel The Same Everywhere?
Imagine scrolling from the year you were born to the future you might grow old in,
watching the world around you warm year by year. In some places, the change might
look gradual. In others, that same future might arrive much earlier. Climate change
is usually explained as one global temperature number, and that number is useful
because it gives people a simple way to understand the overall trend. But it also
hides a lot of the story.
That difference is what we wanted to make visible in A World on Fire. We built it
as a scroll-driven story about how climate change does not happen evenly everywhere.
Some places warm much faster than others, some regions cross dangerous thresholds
earlier, and different emissions futures can lead to very different outcomes. Therefore,
we wanted our project to let people move through the bigger climate story first, then
explore the data more freely at the end.
Turning Climate Data Into A Story
Climate data can be hard to understand because it is both huge and personal at the same time.
On one side, it is made up of global models, scenarios, grids, and temperature projections.
On the other side, it is about the years people live through, the places they call home, and
the futures they might experience. A lot of climate visualizations end up leaning too far in
one direction. They are either simple enough to understand but too general to feel meaningful,
or detailed enough to be accurate but too overwhelming to follow.
That is why we designed A World on Fire as a guided story first and a dashboard second. Instead
of giving the viewer every control immediately, we start with visuals that are easier to read,
like warming stripes and scenario lines, and then build toward more detailed views like the
latitude ridge plot, threshold map, beeswarm, and lifetime chart. Each section adds a new layer
to the same idea: climate change is not just about whether the Earth warms, but how fast it warms,
where that warming happens first, and how different the future can look depending on the scenario.
What If You Could See Your Own Future?
It is one thing to say that different futures are possible, but it feels different when you can
switch between them yourself. The interactions in our project are meant to help the viewer compare,
question, and notice patterns instead of only reading about them. When someone changes the SSP scenario,
they can see how much the future depends on emissions. When they change the warming threshold, they can
see which regions cross that point earlier. When they scrub through years, warming becomes something that
moves across time instead of something shown in one frozen image.
The interactive dashboard at the end gives the reader more freedom after they have already gone through
the guided story. By that point, they have seen the main patterns, so the dashboard becomes a place to
explore instead of a confusing starting point. They can compare regions, scenarios, thresholds, and
years in their own way. This was important to us because the project is supposed to be an explorable
explanation, not just a slideshow of charts. The story explains what matters, and the interactions let
the viewer test those ideas for themselves.
Showing More Than A Map Can Tell
Since climate change affects the whole world, it would have been easy to rely mostly on maps. But maps are not
always the best way to show time, uncertainty, or personal experience. That is why we used different chart
types for different parts of the story. Warming stripes make long-term change feel immediate. Maps show where
warming is concentrated. Ridge plots show how latitude bands cross thresholds at different times. The beeswarm
turns thousands of grid cells into individual points, making the data feel more detailed. The lifetime chart
connects the climate record back to the viewer’s own timeline.
The challenge with using so many visuals is that the page could start to feel disconnected. To avoid that, we
reused similar colors, scenario labels, and section layouts throughout the project. We also included short
annotations and “how to read this” text so the viewer knows what each chart is trying to show. These annotations
help point out patterns that might be easy to miss, like earlier Arctic warming, regional threshold crossings,
and the way mitigation changes the shape of the future. Without those notes, the charts would still show the data,
but they would not guide the viewer through the argument as clearly.
Challenge Accepted!
The hardest part was making the project feel like one connected story instead of a collection of separate visualizations.
We had warming stripes, maps, ridge plots, beeswarms, fan charts, and a personalized timeline, and each one asks the viewer
to read the data in a different way. Going from one chart type to another can be a lot of context-switching. We had to think
carefully about how each section introduced the next one so the reader would understand why the visualization changed.
The beeswarm was also one of the more challenging parts because it had to show thousands of points while still staying readable
and smooth. We wanted each dot to represent part of the climate grid, but too many dots can quickly become messy or slow. That
made us think more carefully about performance, layout, and whether the interaction was actually helping the viewer understand the data.
Overall, the biggest challenge was balancing complexity with clarity. We wanted the project to feel rich and interactive, but not so crowded
that the main message got lost.
Final Takeaway
By the end of the project, we want viewers to understand that climate change is not one fixed future. Every scenario shows warming, but the
amount of warming, the timing of threshold crossings, and the places most affected can change a lot depending on emissions choices. A global
average can tell us that the planet is warming, but it cannot show the full human and regional experience of that warming on its own.
That is why A World on Fire moves between a guided story and an interactive dashboard. The guided sections help the viewer understand the main
patterns, while the dashboard lets them explore those patterns more freely. Our main takeaway is that climate change is global, but it is not
experienced equally. It unfolds differently across regions, across lifetimes, and across possible futures, which means the choices made now still
shape what kind of world people grow old in.