On the
14th of June 2016 I made a heatmap of global temperatures since 1850.
This got popular on reddit with 15.4K points
The picture as
I said in the first comment on the post was inspired by Ed Hawkins spiral animation of world temperatures and was an attempt to show everything in one picture.
A few outlets picked up the picture. The weather channel put it on facebook without crediting me.
Tableau I found out last year use it to advertise themselves but with no credit to me
the original design
Ed Hawkins tweeted about the graph
And in June 2016 we discussed further as
I switched Time to the Y axis and made other changes. My point is he tweeted about "'heat-map' representation of global temperature changes since 1850" two years before he published his heat map representation (using stripes). My graphs used the Hadcrut-4 and
HadCET datasets
In May 2018 he produced a climate graph (below) with only years not
months in the heatmap. At no point has he said that my heatmaps (which were inspired by his global temperatures spiral animation) might have inspired him.
I had produced a heatmap graph with lines for years that he saw in
Sept 2017
Hawkins graph has deservidely become famous. And heatmaps are one of the most common visualisation types, which is evidence he could have come up with it on his own anyway. I would like if my ones did inspire him that it got mentioned somewhere. But the big deal here is that global warming is being shown in a popular eye catching way.
