Randall Munroe’s XKCD Does It Again, Visualises “The Climate Has Changed Before”

Randall Munroe might be a name some of you don’t know, but most everyone will, at one time or another, have come across his greatest creation — the webcomic XKCD. Munroe is not just a web cartoonist, however, having started his career as contract programmer and roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research Center before and after his graduation, before eventually turning to writing XKCD.

So when Munroe tackles issues beyond Cueball’s exploration of the world and his friends’ hobbies, we don’t need to assume it’s just another celebrity with a bit of internet fame stepping beyond their expertise. Randall Munroe gets to step anywhere he wants.

The most recent XKCD comic is entitled Earth Temperature Timeline, and provides “A Timeline Of Earth’s Average Temperature”, done in Munroe’s famous stick-figure, hand-written style, but with all the evidence of scientific research and rigour one would hope for. It shows what it actually means when someone says “the climate has changed before” — and compares those actual ‘changes’ with the unprecedented change that is currently underway.

The massive image is found below, or over at XKCD.com.