Tag Archives: data source

From the eia article Monthly U.S. propane exports in March 2023 reached a record high by Josh Eiermann (6/6/2023)

U.S. propane exports reached a record 1.7 million barrels per day (b/d) in March 2023, the highest level since we began collecting this data in 1973. Propane is consumed globally for space heating and is used as a petrochemical feedstock.

The graph shows a noticeable increase to Asia. Why?

U.S. propane exports to Asia have increased rapidly in recent years, driven in part by the region’s increasing demand for propylene, a chemical that can be produced from propane. Propylene is used to manufacture polypropylene, a versatile plastic with many uses, including in car interiors, packaging, and personal protective equipment.

There is one other graph and links to data.

EPI gives an overview of the economic state of the class of 2023 in their Class of 2023 post by Elise Gould, Katherine deCourcy and Jori Kandra (5/24/2023). Two findings:

Workers of all ages have experienced stronger-than-usual wage growth in the pandemic business cycle (February 2020 to March 2023)—even after accounting for high inflation—but young workers were not left behind like they have been in previous business cycles.

Entry-level high school graduates (ages 17–20) saw real wage growth three times as fast as entry-level college graduates (ages 21–24) in the pandemic business cycle.

The figure here is one of four with data available in the article. The interesting thing here is the Hispanic pay which is about $0.85 more than White and Black pay. What explains this? Could there be a regional effect?

Check out my other site Briefed by Data.

From the iea Global EV Outlook 2023 Trends in batteries:

Automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% to 550 GWh in 2022, from about 330 GWh in 2021, primarily as a result of growth in electric passenger car sales, with new registrations increasing by 55% in 2022 relative to 2021.

There are 9 interactive graphs in this article with lots of information. I chose to show the one on supply and demand of lithium.

The increase in battery demand drives the demand for critical materials. In 2022, lithium demand exceeded supply (as in 2021) despite the 180% increase in production since 2017. In 2022, about 60% of lithium, 30% of cobalt and 10% of nickel demand was for EV batteries. Just five years earlier, in 2017, these shares were around 15%, 10% and 2%, respectively. As has already been seen for lithium, mining and processing of these critical minerals will need to increase rapidly to support the energy transition, not only for EVs but more broadly to keep up with the pace of demand for clean energy technologies.

Some of the charts have the data available for download.

From NOAA’s April 2023 Global Climate Report:

April 2023 was the fourth-warmest April for the globe in NOAA’s 174-year record. The April global surface temperature was 1.00°C (1.80°F) above the 20th-century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F). The 10 warmest April months have occurred since 2010. April 2023 marked the 49th consecutive April and the 530th consecutive month with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.

Highlights:

Global ocean temperatures set a record high for April at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the long-term average. This marked the second-highest monthly ocean temperature for any month on record, just 0.01°C (0.02°F) shy of the record-warm ocean temperatures set in January 2016.

The Southern Hemisphere experienced its warmest April and warmest month on record.

The data is available at a link on the top of the page.

The eia article U.S. households in warmer states consumer less site energy than household in colder states by Greg Lawson and Mickey Francis (5/4/2023) provides this great graph.

Site energy refers to the amount of energy that enters a home, including electricity from the grid, electricity from onsite solar panels, natural gas, propane, and fuel oil. Site energy includes different forms of energy, and with respect to electricity, it does not account for the losses associated with conversion of primary fuels to electricity or the electrical losses in the transmission and distribution system. Site energy consumption is a combination of the energy consumption from all energy end uses in a home, including seasonal end uses such as space heating and cooling, as well as non-seasonal end uses such as cooking and consumer electronics.

However,

In 2020, the average energy expenditures, or the amount of money a household spent on site energy, was affected by several factors beyond temperature, such as the type of energy used. Households in North Dakota (the second-coldest state) used an average of 94.3 MMBtu in 2020, nearly twice as much as homes in Florida (the second-warmest state), at 50.3 MMBtu. However, the average energy expenditures were about the same for homes in both states—$1,648 in North Dakota and $1,654 in Florida—in part because more than three-quarters of households in Florida reported that they only use electricity in their homes and U.S. average residential electricity prices are more than three times higher than residential natural gas prices.

There is one other nice graph of expenditures and links to data.

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.

The image here is the annual average temperature anomalies in 2022 compared to  the 1981-2010 baseline average. The image uses data from the Berkeley Earth high-resolution data set as noted in the article Introducing the Berkeley Earth High-Resolution Dataset by Robert Rohde (3/28/2023):

The new Berkeley Earth High Resolution Data Set improves upon the previous version by providing a 0.25° x 0.25° lat-long resolution (approximately 30 km at the equator), which is four times higher than the previous 1° x 1° resolution. This allows for a more accurate representation of small-scale temperature variations, particularly in areas where geography is changing rapidly, such as coastlines and mountainous terrain.  It also does a better job of capturing ocean variations related to currents and other structures.  The new gridded data product derives its information from approximately 50,000 weather stations and more than 450,000,000 ocean temperature measurements, providing excellent coverage of the Earth’s surface.

The good news is the Berkeley Earth makes this data available on its data page. Read more about the data and processing in the article.

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.

The NASA post NASA Uses 30-Year Satellite Record to Track and Project Rising Seas (3/17/2023) has this to say (with calculus language):

Since satellites began observing sea surface height in 1993 with the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon mission, the average global sea level has increased by 3.6 inches (9.1 centimeters), according to NASA’s Sea Level Change science team. The annual rate of rise – or how quickly sea level rise is happening – that researchers expect to see has also increased from 0.08 inches (0.20 centimeters) per year in 1993 to 0.17 inches (0.44 centimeters) per year in 2022. Based on the long-term satellite measurements, the projected rate of sea level rise will hit 0.26 inches (0.66 centimeters) per year by 2050.

Interesting fact in the article:

The 2022 increase was less than the expected annual rate because of a mild La Niña. During years with an especially strong La Niña climate pattern, average global sea level can even temporarily drop because weather patterns shift in a way that leads to more rainfall over land instead of the ocean.

NASA Sea Level page with data.