Bronna A. Butler and Jessica K. Sklar
Artist Bronna A. Butler and mathematician Jessica K. Sklar began
collaborating as QED Arts, LLC in Spring 2020, after serendipitously
connecting at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. They create pieces that
celebrate mathematics as a humanistic endeavor and honor its elegance,
working from the premises that mathematics is for everyone and that
whimsy and mathematics are not mutually exclusive.
Mathematics is a crucial tool for analyzing climate change, and
plays significant roles in the fields of environmental science and
sustainability. Here we focus on the global mean surface
temperature (GMST), which has risen alarmingly in recent years.
Minor fluctuations notwithstanding, the change in temperature in
degrees Celsius ($\Delta^\circ$C) relative to 1850-1900 has
dramatically increased; moreover, generally it is increasing more
and more rapidly as the years go by. In our piece, OctoPi has
created a simplified version of the graph found in Figure 1.2 of
the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report:
Global Warming of 1.5$^\circ$ Celsius" (p. 57), and drawn
derivatives in the sand indicating the graph’s trends.