There’s been a few football shirts that climate action activists have paid attention to – one of them belongs to Reading FC, and instead of a traditional hooped design, the sleeves carry warming stripes – those now-famous bands of colour that shift from deep blue to burning red, year by year, showing how our planet’s temperature has changed since records began. And they are really useful in the classroom.
TLDR: Just download the resource here!
It’s a striking piece of kit. But what makes it interesting isn’t the design, but where it can be seen. Not at a climate conference. Not in an environmental campaign leaflet. On a football pitch. In front of fans who came to watch a Championship match, not to be educated about carbon. Forest Green Rovers have since done something similar. The stripes are clearly doing the rounds – and they can be used in your classroom just as effectively.
That’s the thing about warming stripes. They have an unusual habit of escaping the usual circles.
Warming Stripes: A different kind of climate communication
Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading, the warming stripes are deceptively simple. Each vertical stripe represents one year’s average temperature for a given place, compared to a 30-year baseline. Blue for cooler. Red for warmer. Nothing else, unless you want them. They really are that simple.
The image makes the trend viscerally obvious. You don’t need to understand climate science to look at the Newcastle upon Tyne stripes and notice that something has shifted. The left side is mostly blue. The right side is mostly red. The change happens gradually, then in the last few decades quite fast.
That clarity is why the stripes have appeared on beer bottles, scarves, phone cases, concert backdrops, and now football shirts. They travel well and are easy to understand. They work outside the usual channels where climate communication tends to stay stuck.
The eco-bubble problem
Most climate education materials, and plenty of climate campaigns, are seen almost entirely by people who were already interested. The engaged minority passes information between itself – I wrote a little about this problem here.
The stripes are simple because they aren’t accompanied with any preachy rhetoric, or a story that fails to connect. That restraint is rarer than it sounds. And in a classroom, it’s really useful as a way of opening up a conversation rather than close one down.
Why the warming stripes work in your classroom
The warming stripes aren’t just good climate communication, they’re also good data. And exploring them in class creates a real opportunity to teach how to read a visualisation critically. What does each stripe actually represent? What is a baseline, and why does it matter? What does the image show?And what questions can’t it answer on its own? What would you need to know before making a decision based on this?
These are maths and literacy questions as much as climate ones. And they’re the right questions to ask in a world where pupils are constantly encountering data in different ways, some rigorous, some misleading, some somewhere in between.
There’s also something valuable in the controversy. Climate communication is controversial, you can’t get away from that: not always on the science, but on tone, framing, and whose voices get heard. The warming stripes are an interesting case study in what happens when you strip all of that away and just show the numbers. Encourage your pupils to ask questions, explore what doesn’t work and look at what else we might need to know.
Finding your local stripes
One of the best things about the project is that it’s genuinely local. You can find warming stripes for hundreds of locations across the UK and beyond at showyourstripes.info so rather than looking at a global average, your class can look at what’s happened in Newcastle, or Leeds, or Cardiff, or wherever is close enough to feel real. Because climate change can feel abstract and distant a stripe for your town, covering the years your grandparents grew up in, can really work.
The Ground Level activity What Does Normal Look Like? is designed to use your local stripes as a starting point — building from the basics of averages and baselines through to a genuinely critical look at what one dataset can and can’t tell us. It’s free to download at notyetzero.com.
