A Hypnotic Animation of the World's Carbon Emissions

With the planet’s January-October period ranking as the warmest ever recorded, it’s looking more and more likely 2015 will go down as the hottest year in known history. (And by an “enormous margin,” notes the Capital Weather Gang.)

To help us understand what’s driving up the temperature, NASA has created this hypnotic visualization of two huge sources of atmospheric CO2: burning biomass and emissions from megacities, aka those with populations above 10 million. Based on a supercomputer’s climate simulation, the animation is perhaps a little too beautiful given its subject matter. Fire-caused emissions from agriculture and lightning-sparked wildfires swirl like actual flames in Africa, Australia, and South America, whereas urban CO2 pours like blue chimney-smoke from Southern California, the Northeast, China, the U.K., and elsewhere.