censuswall A story · The years since 1880, and the people alive in 2025
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A story in pictures

The only world they have known

The years since 1880, and the people alive in 2025. Scroll: each picture changes with the words beside it.

Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries

cooler than 1951–1980warmer

How to read this: one stripe for each year from 1880 to 2025. Blue years were cooler than the world’s 1951–1980 average, red years warmer; the stronger the colour, the further from it, in steps of 0.2 °C.

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One stripe for every year

Each stripe is one year since 1880: how warm the whole world was, compared with its average for 1951–1980. Blue is cooler, red is warmer, and the stronger the colour, the further from the average. The warmest so far was 2024, at 1.28 °C above it.

Climate →

cooler than 1951–1980warmer

How to read this: one stripe for each year from 1880 to 2025. Blue years were cooler than the world’s 1951–1980 average, red years warmer; the stronger the colour, the further from it, in steps of 0.2 °C.

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1976: the last cooler year

The last year cooler than that average was 1976. Every year since has been warmer: 49 years in a row.

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aged 47 or youngerolder

How to read this: one bar for each age, newborns on the left, 100 and over on the right; the taller the bar, the more people of that age were alive in the middle of 2025.

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Most people alive were born after it

Now line up everyone alive in 2025 by age. Everyone 47 or younger was born after 1976: 72 in every 100 people, 5,932,069,100 of them, have never lived through a cooler year. Most people alive are young.

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aged 9 or youngerolder

How to read this: one bar for each age, newborns on the left, 100 and over on the right; the taller the bar, the more people of that age were alive in the middle of 2025.

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The children know only the warmest years

Every child under 10 (1,320,613,400 people, about one person in six) has lived only in the 11 warmest years ever measured, 2015 to 2025.

Climate →

How to read this: one column a year: parts of carbon dioxide in every million parts of air, measured on Mauna Loa in Hawaiʻi. The two lines are 350 and 400.

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The air changed too

Carbon dioxide traps heat. In 1959 the air held 315.98 parts of it per million; in 2025, 427.35. It passed 350 in 1988 and 400 in 2015.

Climate →

Sources and method

The stories are drawn when the site is built, from the same files as the pages they link to: the UN's population counts and projections, the UN's cities, the scholars' estimates before 1950, NASA's temperatures and NOAA's air. Projections are hatched; where the UN gives a range for the whole population, it is drawn. The UN gives no range for each age, or for cities and the countryside, and the stories say so.