Temperature Anomalies by Country

This 36-second animation from Windy.com shows temperature anomalies for every country from 1880 to 2017, based on NASA's GISTEMP dataset. It is one of the quickest ways to see that warming is happening almost everywhere, not just in a few places.

Why anomalies matter

• A temperature anomaly is how much warmer or cooler a place is than its own long-term average, not its actual temperature
• Anomalies let scientists compare hot and cold regions fairly and track change over time
• They are the standard measure used to track global warming

The evidence

The animation makes two well-established findings easy to see. Warming is global: by the end of the record nearly every country is warmer than its historical average. Warming is also uneven: land warms faster than the oceans, and the Arctic is warming several times faster than the planet as a whole. That uneven pattern is why a cold winter in one place doesn't contradict a warming world, a common talking point in climate denial.

Related reading: Anecdotal Evidence and Climate Change, Global Inequities and Climate Change and Anthropogenic Climate Change.