Disconnected from the climate? Maybe you should pick up knitting.

The 21^st of June every year has been named #ShowYourStripesDay. This was started in 2019 by a climate scientist called Ed Hawkins. He created a website that could visualise climate data into a chart with annual stripes showing the temperature for different regions of the world. These stripes were classified by red and blue lines with blue representing colder than average conditions and red showing warmer than average.

Here is a climate stripe chart for Johannesburg from 1881 to now.  

What these charts can do is show us very clearly and quickly how the climate is changing. They can also show which regions of the world are changing faster than others. But this made me think about how we each relate to temperature and climate in our daily lives. Many of us are relatively insulated from temperature in our daily lives. Between being indoors in our homes, workplaces and even schools and universities and commuting via cars or busses or taxis, we rarely spend all day outdoors, let alone a whole year. This means that many of us are protected from the extremes of temperature. This may be more pronounced on more developed nations as air conditioning may be more widely available.

But some people are trying to reconnect with the climate conditions in their cities or neighbourhoods. One very creative way that this is being done by crafty people around the world is in the creation of temperature blankets. These yarn projects assign a range of temperatures to certain colours, and each day the makers use the daily temperature to knit or crochet a stripe in the corresponding colour. People can choose what they want to record, from the average temperature or the maximum and minimum or even whether that day was above the average for the season, and each tells a different story.

Here is an example of a temperature blanket. 

This is a really cool way not only to understand temperature but to commit to understanding the local climate that you live in more deeply. I love this idea, but these projects are a huge commitment as they require constant work over a whole year. And I also love that they allow us to have our own personal and visual records of the climate. I have never made a temperature blanket, but I have personally kept a bullet journal spread of average climate per day of an entire year. This is another way we can keep our own records of our local climate.

Here is what that can look like in a notebook.

You may ask: what is even the point? We can access climate data for every day in the past few years, why bother spending so much time on a temperature blanket? All of this is true, you can access a lot of historical climate data, but do you? Do any of us regularly look back at the climate records of the past year? I personally do not, in fact I more regularly look up weather predictions for the future. So, the value of climate records like temperature blankets is that they visually show what the past year has been like at a glance, and maybe make us think more about our own role in climate change as time goes on. This is the same for the #ShowYourStripes campaign, it shows at a glance how temperatures are changing without being bogged down by specific numbers. 

Maybe one day these temperature blankets will be seen as relics of past temperatures in the way we look at tree rings. Maybe they will be passed down from grandmothers to grandchildren and they will understand that the world they live in is not at all like the one we live in today. Hopefully one day we will be able to look back at temperature blankets and see that not much has changed, that we have successfully slowed our global warming trend. But for now, as climate anxiety is rising, and more people try to reconnect with the nature and climate around them, temperature blankets can be a tool for connecting more people to their home climates. So, maybe the answer for feeling disconnected from nature and your local climate can be to pick up knitting.