[crazygringo]

The climate spiral can be misleading though, because it's natural for a viewer to interpret the change in terms of area.

Then, the increase from 1.5° to 2° looks much, much larger than the increase from 0° to 0.5°.

So it's misleading in terms of making recent warming seem even worse than it is. Now, of course, you might argue that is justified in spirit because the negative consequences from warming grow faster than linear... but that doesn't make it any less misleading in terms of the temperature change it is communicating.

[layer8]

It would be easy to adjust the radius so that the area increase is proportional to the temperature increase.

[moomin]

It would be, but humans are famously bad at judging relative areas at all, which is a problem for data visualisation everywhere.

[anonymousiam]

0° is not zero. Your premise would be true if we were using the Kelvin temperature scale.

[crazygringo]

No, this has nothing to do with which temperature scale is being used.

This is measuring change in degrees from a baseline.