From the R Bloggers website (David Smith):
Due to anthropogenic climate change, the average global temperature has increased steadily over the past decade or so. While we’re all familiar with the hockey-stick line chart of rising temperature, the change is even more dramatic on this animated globe showing the local effects of climate change.
The first half of the animation shows the monthly local change compared to historic averages (blue is cooler; red is warmer). The second half of the animation repeats the cycle, but introduces a moving 10-year smoother to reduce the variability in the temperature changes, making the global temperature increase much more apparent in the forecast part of the animation. The overlaid time series shows the global average temperatue deviations from the historical average, in degrees Celcius.
This animation was created by Matt Leonawicz, Lead Statistical Analyst at the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning, using the R language. He created a custom R package called “mapmate” (available on Github).