Tag Archives: charts and graphs

The image here is the last frame in an animated bar chart from the article Animated Chart of the Day: Female Share of US Bachelor’s Degrees, 1971-2020 by Mark J. Perry (4/28/2023). The animated bar chart is worth watching and considering. The author makes his observations and here is one:

What’s also especially noteworthy about the visualization is the remarkable stability in the female share of degrees in almost all 16 academic fields over the last 20 years, a period when the long-term trends seem to have stabilized. The only two exceptions to the stabilization of the female share of degrees since the turn of the century are the increase in the female share of Architecture degrees from 37.6% in 2000 to 48.1% in 2020 and the decrease in the female share of Computer Science degrees from 28.1% in 2000 to 21.3% in 2020. But follow the bars for any of the other 14 college majors over the last several decades and you’ll see that there is very little variation in the female share of bachelor’s degrees from 2000 to 2020.

The data comes from the Digest of Education Statistics.

From NOAA March 2023 Global Climate Report:

March 2023 was the second-warmest March for the globe in NOAA’s 174-year record. The March global surface temperature was 1.24°C (2.23°F) above the 20th-century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F). March 2023 marked the 47th consecutive March and the 529th consecutive month with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average. The March 2023 temperature anomaly was the third highest for all months, after March 2016 and February 2016.

Global land-only temperatures ranked second warmest on record at 2.26°C (4.07°F) above average. Ocean-only temperatures ranked third-warmest on record for March, which is an important item to note as the long-lived La Niña ends. On March 9, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center announced the end of the three-year La Niña, as well as a return to neutral El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO-neutral) conditions likely through Northern Hemisphere spring and early summer 2023.

Data is available at the top of the page.

If you aren’t good with geography you might think all the rain in California should have Lake Meade rising. As you can see from the graph Lake Mead didn’t rise much this winter and it is heading back down again. At this point dropping below 1040 ft in the next few months is likely. The previous Lake Mead post with links to the data.  I’ll check back in a couple of months.

Climate Reanalyzer has an interactive time series chart of ocean temperatures. The dark black line at the top is the  current year and shall we say we are in uncharted waters.  It would  be nice if this graph was colored by ENSO status in the way NOAA has a global temperature graph by ENSO status. Why does this matter? According to a Guardian article:

La Niña periods – characterised by cooling in the central and eastern tropical Pacific and stronger trade winds – have a cooling influence on global temperatures. During El Niño periods, the ocean temperatures in those regions are warmer than usual and global temperatures are pushed up.

After a few years of La Niña we’ll see what El Niño will do to global temps.

The World Bank article March 2023 global poverty update from the World Bank: the challenge of estimating poverty in the pandemic (3/29/2023) reports on poverty updates:

Global poverty estimates were updated today on the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). This update includes new regional poverty aggregates in 2020 and 2021 for Latin America and the Caribbean, and in 2020 for Europe and Central Asia, and the group of advanced countries. These are the regions for which we now have sufficient survey data available during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 113 new country-years have been added, bringing the total number of surveys to more than 2,100.

The summary with calculus terms:

It is still the case that global poverty has been falling since the 1990s, and at a slower rate since 2014 (World Bank 2022). Extreme poverty has been falling in all regions, except the Middle East and North Africa due to conflict and fragility (World Bank 2020). Roughly 60% of the world’s extreme poor in 2019 lived in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, while 81% of the global poor at the poverty line of $3.6.

The PIP itself is a page worth exploring. It doesn’t look like much but if you start clicking you’ll find there is much to discover. Try the calculator on the bottom right of the graph or trying clicking a country.

First some good news. The eia report Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022 by Katherine Antonio (3/27/2023) notes

Last year, the U.S. electric power sector produced 4,090 million megawatthours (MWh) of electric power. In 2022, generation from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal—surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time. Renewable generation surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021 and continued to provide more electricity than nuclear generation last year.

On the other hand, in 2021 solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal made up 18.5% of electricity generation and that moved to only 20.25% in 2022.  You can get his data from the electricity data browser from the eia. It is a great tool that provides graphs and downloads of the selected data.

There has been some talk in the news about increasing maternal mortality in the U.S. This is due to the new CDC report Maternal Mortality Rates  in the United States, 2021 by Donna L. Hoyert (3/16/2023). The graph here is one from the report. Clearly the upward trend started before COVID and there is a racial difference. We should note that another graph shows upward trends by age group too.

Rates in 2021 were 20.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for women under age 25, 31.3 for those aged 25–39, and 138.5 for those aged 40 and over (Figure 2 and Table). The rate for women aged 40 and over was 6.8 times higher than the rate for women under age 25. Differences in the rates between age groups were statistically significant. The increases in the rates between 2020 and 2021 for each of these age groups were statistically significant.

The article includes a table of data and the number of births women 40+ have increased, which might explain some,  but not all, of the increase. Either way, the data is waiting for analysis is a statistics class.

As to the racial differences. In 2019 Kevin Drum reported on this in his post How Can We Reduce Black Maternal Mortality? He makes a case that the differences aren’t explained by racism; it is longish and worth reading.  A few quotes:

The differences in allostatic load are tiny—about the equivalent of one IQ point on an intelligence test—and Hispanics have a higher allostatic load than either blacks or whites but the lowest maternal mortality rate.

Poor blacks report less stress and higher levels of optimism than both poor whites and poor Hispanics. Put all this together and the toxic stress/weathering hypotheses look shaky.

What it seems to tell us is that there’s a difference in when black mothers die. Any pregnancy-related death within a year of delivery is counted as maternal mortality, and the difference in IHM rates suggests that in white hospitals black mothers die at high rates in the hospital, while in black hospitals they die at high rates after going home.

NASA calls this a climate spiral. The visualization is well done, so watch it. The NASA page includes a link to the data used to make the visualization.

There is a general narrative that younger generation are doing worse then older generations. When a narrative is “common knowledge” it is worth investigating if it is true or not. For the 35-44 year age range Kevin Drum has done just that in his post The (not kids anymore) are doing alright (3/2/2023). He has four graphs one of which is copied here. Some facts:

However, right now their unemployment rate is 2.6%, as low as it’s ever been.

Full-time workers are being paid more today than full-time workers of 20 years ago.

As with the full-time chart, annual earnings are higher now for 35-44 year-olds than they were 20 years ago.

This is not to say everything is perfect, but it does provide evidence that life isn’t that bad for the 35-44 cohort. The question then is why does this narrative exist?  The frustrating part here is this data is easily available at the BLS. Maybe journalist could take the time to look up a few facts before they make statements.

The Antarctic set a new record sea ice minimum at 1.788 million square kilometers beating out last years 1.924 million square kilometers. The graph here comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s (NSIDC) Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph.  This is a great tool that allows the user to select Arctic or Antarctic, choose color schemes, and select the years to display. A link near the top right  corner of the graph allows users to download the data and the graph.