Click me: https://ryanwk.github.io/Data-Viz-Final-Project/
We chose this topic to spread awareness about climate change. It’s difficult to make a meaningful impact on climate change without understanding the details. So, this semester we set out to build an exploratory visualization that could visually depict the antagonists of climate change. After deliberation and research, we discovered that two of the major factors affecting our climate are two greenhouse gasses, C02 and Methane. We then did research on what the major sources of those gasses are and landed on the agriculture and fossil fuel industry. A deeper look into these domains revealed that cows, specifically dairy cows, and vehicles are the greatest sources of destructive the greenhouse gases C02 and CH4 (Methane).
Methane and C02 data was obtained from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Car data was obtained from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Association. Those data include motor vehicles that are privately, commercially, and publicly inclusive of automobiles, buses, trucks, and motorcycles.
Cow data was obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.
From those sources we obtained a variety of .csv files, cleaned those data sets, and developed 16 different .csv files that serve as the underlying data of our visualization.
The goal of our viz is to bring a bunch of datasets together in one place and allow users to understand where these gasses are coming from in an exploratory manner. Therefore, users can approach our visualization with a hypothesis related to climate change and its antagonists while viewing the data from a multitude of credible sources.
A Choropleth of the United States is used to depict temporal change in C02 and Methane emissions. Data spanning 2013-2017 is toggled via a sliding bar located under the bar chart. As a user clicks on a state, that state, appears on the bar chart linked to the right of the US map. to provide a deeper look at information that provokes these gasses, such as the number of cows or cars in each state.
From our research we learned that methane has the greatest effect on acute climate change compared to C02. While reducing C02 is important for our climate long term, reducing methane should be prioritized to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change that we will see in our lifetime!
Another interesting thing we discovered using the visualization was that in 2017 C02 emissions dramatically dropped. This supports our research that more Americans are switching from coal-based fuel sources to natural gas energy sources like Methane. The following article also supports this reduced C02 emissions in 2017:
If we had another semester to work on this project, we would add more years of data to provide a longitudinal and temporal perspective to the ways in which Methane and C02 producers effect climate change. Likewise, we would add projections of sea-level rise to illustrate a cause and effect relationship to our data.
https://www.data.gov/ http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1362 https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://data.worldbank.org/ https://ghgdata.epa.gov/ghgp/ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.METH.AG.ZS?locations=US&view=map https://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/5235182/Statistics-Dairy-cows.pdf https://www.statista.com/statistics/194934/number-of-milk-cows-in-the-us-since-1999/ http://www.fao.org/in-action/enteric-methane/background/why-is-enteric-methane-important/en/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/dairy-data/