What are the best news sources?

The PEW article Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable by Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Oliphant and Elisa Shearer (7/30/2020) answers the question with the graph copied here.

As of late last year, 18% of U.S. adults say they turn most to social media for political and election news. That’s lower than the share who use news websites and apps (25%), but about on par with the percent who say their primary pathway is cable television (16%) or local television (16%), and higher than the shares who turn to three other pathways mentioned in the survey (network TV, radio and print).

One specific set of nine questions focused on foundational political knowledge, such as the federal budget deficit and which party supports certain policy positions. Researchers created an index of high, middle or low political knowledge based on how many of these nine questions respondents got right (high knowledge answered eight to nine questions correctly, middle got six or seven right and low got five or fewer right; see here for more details of the political knowledge index). While at least four-in-ten individuals who turn mainly to news websites and apps (45%), radio (42%) and print (41%) for news fall into the high political knowledge category, the same is true of just 17% of those who turn most to social media. Only those in the local TV group scored lower, with 10% in the high political knowledge category.

Even as Americans who primarily turn to social media for political news are less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues in the news, they are more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims.

This is an extensive article with numerous charts and  graphs. There is also a detailed methodology section.

How cold is Lake Superior at a depth of 135ft?

The great lakes observing system has a Great Lakes Buoy Portal that provides access to data from great lakes buoys. The link first takes one to a map where buoys can  be selected. For example, buoy 45028 is near Duluth, MN. The interactive graph on the page is copied here. There are other data sets which include, wind speed, wind gust, wind direction, wave height, air temp, solar radiation, along with water temp at various depths. The data download button on the page allows users to select data over various time periods. GPS coordinates of the buoy are also given. There is a lot of data here waiting to be used in a classroom.

How much has sea level changed?

NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet Sea Level Sea Level page provides data on sea level. For example, since 1993 sea level has increased  by about 94mm, but this is an average. In their Sea Level 101, Part Two: All Sea Level is `Local’ by Alan Buis (7/14/2020) they provide the map copied here. There is noticeable variation in sea level change around the globe. They note:

“Relative sea level” refers to the height of the ocean relative to land along a coastline. Common causes of relative sea level change include:

    • Changes due to heating of the ocean, and changes in ocean circulation

    • Changes in the volume of water in the ocean due to the melting of land ice in glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets, as well as changes in the global water cycle

    • Vertical land motion (up or down movements of the land itself at a coastline, such as sinking caused by the compaction of sediments, or the rise and fall of land masses driven by the movement of continental or oceanic tectonic plates)

    • Normal, short-term, frequent variations in sea level that have always existed, such as those associated with tides, storm surges, and ocean waves (swell and wind waves). These variations can be on the order of meters or more (discussed in more detail in our previous blog post).

There are other graphics in the post including an animation of Greenland ice loss with a scatter plot.

What impacts earth’s climate?

The article in Quanta Magazine How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things are Different Now)  by Howard Lee (7/21/2020) provides a summary of 10 different causes that impact earth’s climate and how they compare with modern climate change. On example is plate tectonics as see in the graphic copied here. Another is Orbital Wobbles:

Magnitude: Approximately 6 degrees Celsius in the last 100,000-year cycle; varies through geological time

Time frame: Regular, overlapping cycles of 23,000, 41,000, 100,000, 405,000 and 2,400,000 years

Earth’s orbit wobbles as the sun, the moon and other planets change their relative positions. These cyclical wobbles, called Milankovitch cycles, cause the amount of sunlight to vary at middle latitudes by up to 25% and cause the climate to oscillate. These cycles have operated throughout time, yielding the alternating layers of sediment you see in cliffs and road cuts.

This is a good article for quantitative literacy with the comparisons of magnitudes and time frames of different effects on the climate. To be clear

However, the weathering thermostat takes hundreds of thousands of years to react to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Earth’s oceans can act somewhat faster to absorb and remove excess carbon, but even that takes millennia and can be overwhelmed, leading to ocean acidification. Each year, the burning of fossil fuels emits about 100 times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes emit — too much too fast for oceans and weathering to neutralize it, which is why our climate is warming and our oceans are acidifying.

How efficient is electricity?

In the eia post, More than 60% of energy used for electricity is lost in conversion, by Bill Sanchez (7/21/2020), includes the flow diagram here. Note the flow across the top represents conversion losses.

Electricity is a secondary energy source that is produced when primary energy sources (for example, natural gas, coal, wind) are converted into electric power.

The technology and the type of fuel used to generate electricity affect the efficiency of power plants. For example, in 2019, of the 11.9 quads of natural gas consumed for electricity generation, natural gas plants converted 45% (5.4 quads) into net generation of electricity. By contrast, of the 10.2 quads of coal consumption, coal plants converted 32% (3.3 quads) into net generation.

The post has three other graphs and links to electricity data.

What’s new at sustainabilitymath?

There is now a new page that contains animations for concepts related to statistics and calculus. They are not sustainability related, but since I post materials for calculus and statistics and I have been playing with R, I decided to post these. There are 19 topics covered with 36 animations. In particular, if you teach calculus or statistics these animations may be helpful. So, go to the Animations page and take a look.

How hot was June 2020?

From NOAA’s Global Climate Report – June 2020:

Averaged as a whole, the global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2020 was 0.92°C (1.66°F) above the 20th century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F), tying with 2015 as the third highest June temperature departure from average in the 141-year record.

Nine of the 10 warmest Junes have occurred since 2010; the seven warmest Junes have occurred in the last seven years (2014–2020).

The June 2020 global land-only surface temperature was also the third highest for June at 1.29°C (2.32°F) above average. The global ocean-only surface temperature of 0.77°C (1.39°F) was also the third highest for June in the 141-year record.

The links in the quotes are to the related time series data.

How do we calculate sea level?

If you aren’t sure how sea level is calculated then read NASA’s Sea Level 101: What determines the Level of the Sea? by Alan Buis (6/3/2020) . Here is one factor:

If our ocean had no tides or currents, the sea surface would assume the shape of the geoid. These “gravity anomaly” maps, based on data from the U.S./German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, show where Earth’s gravity field differs from a simplified Earth model that is perfectly smooth and featureless. Areas colored yellow, orange or red are areas where the actual gravity field is large, such as the Himalayan Mountains in Central Asia (top left of the left-hand globe). The progressively darker shades of blue indicate places where the gravity field is smaller, such as the area around Hudson Bay in Canada (top center of right-hand globe). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If you are going to teach about climate change and related ramifications such as sea levels rising, then reading articles such as this one provides helpful background knowledge. Also, it’s just real interesting.

How do I teach about climate change when I know so little?

If you would like to incorporate climate change in your math class, by say using the calculus or statistics project here, but you don’t feel like you know enough, then you need an overview for teachers. The Paleontological Research Institute has a teacher-friendly guide to climate change. The audience for the book, free in pdf form, is high school earth science  and environmental science teachers, but it also works as a primer for those looking to add climate issues to their math class. There are useful graph and tidbits, such as FAQ 11 in Chapter 12 (see the graph copied here):

A second method that uses real data in order to create a false impression is manipulation of the scale on a graph. As discussed in the “warming hiatus” question above (Question 6), showing data over a very short time frame can be misleading. Similarly, using a vertical scale to either magnify or suppress a trend can also be misleading. For example, the temperature data plotted on the two graphs in Figure 12.2 is exactly the same (the same data from Question 5), but the scale has been expanded in the right-hand graph to compress the data and make the temperature increase appear non-existent. This procedure has been used by some who deny the existence or significance of climate change
to give an impression of “no problem.”

Chapter 6 in the text provides information specific to different regions in the U.S., which helps provide local background related to climate. All in all an excellent resource, especially if you want to know the basics so that you are comfortable raising climate issues in a math classroom.

Is there a relationship between education level and marriage?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics post 60 percent of college graduates born from 1980 to 1984 were married at age 33 (6/30/2020) provides the chart copied here.

At age 33, people with higher levels of education were more likely to be married and less likely to be cohabiting than those with lower levels of education. At the time of their 33rd birthday, 32 percent of high school dropouts, 42 percent of high school graduates with no college, 49 percent of people with some college or an associate degree, and 60 percent of college graduates were married. Twenty-eight percent of those with less than a high school diploma were cohabiting, compared with only 13 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and higher.

For related data, see the Census Bureau Educational Attainment in the United States: 2019 Table 2.  For people 25 years and over no more than 53% of those that didn’t complete at least an Associates degree here married. For those that have a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, Professional degree, and Doctoral degree the percentage are 63%, 68%, 71%, and 73% respectively.