Sustainability Math A Quantitative Literacy and Mathematics Resource for Instructors

Rick Nevin provides updated graphs, one of the four posted here, in his post Update: Juvenile crime still falling fast in 2021 (4/2/2023).

USA arrest rates by age have only been updated through 2020, but juvenile arrest data reported by 10 states (FL, TX, CA, NY, VA, TN, WA, SC, GA, NC) show the trend toward zero juvenile crime continued in 2021. Weighted average data for these 10 states (accounting for about half of the USA population) show the following changes in juvenile arrests from 2020 to 2021:

Burglary: Down 34%
Motor Vehicle Theft: Down 13%
Other Felony Larceny-Theft: Down 28%
Total Felony Property Crime: Down 29%
Robbery: Down 23%
Aggravated Assault: Up 7% (after a 29% decline from 2019 to 2020)
Total Violent Crime: Down 5%.

There is a link to the data and he ends with this:

The impact of birth year trends in lead exposure is the only criminology theory that can explain this extraordinary ongoing decline in juvenile crime.

The eia article Mixed water supply condition across western states affects 2023 hydropower outlook by Lindsay Aramayo (5/10/2023) has this to say

Record-breaking rain and snow in parts of the western United States contribute to our forecast 72% rise in hydropower generation in California this year compared with last year, according to our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). However, below-normal precipitation and a mixed water supply outlook in the Pacific Northwest, which generates a significant portion of the country’s hydropower, offset the forecast increase in hydropower generation in California.

Interestingly,

The Pacific Northwest houses more than one-third of U.S. hydropower capacity and produces about half of the country’s total hydropower, on average.

There is another graph in the article and more about hydropower, as well as links to the data.

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 Census Bureau article Gains in Educational Attainment, Enrollment in All Hispanic Groups, Largest Among South American Population by Erik L. Hernandez and Kevin McElrath (5/10/2023) notes

The number of Hispanic people ages 18 to 24 enrolled in college increased to 2.4 million in 2021, up from 1.2 million in 2005.

The share of all college students ages 18 to 24 who were Hispanic grew, too. The lowest share during the period (11.4%) was in 2006; by 2021 it had swelled to nearly 20%.

The article notes that in 2021 Hispanics made up 18.7% of the U.S. population, represented by the orange line in the graph. Does this mean that Hispanics are proportionally represented in college? Not necessarily so I’ll leave this as a research project. Hint: Proportions by age matter here.

There are three other graphs and reference to the data in the article.

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 graph here is from the EPI article Class of 2023: Young adults are graduating into a strong labor market by Elise Gould, Jori Kandra, and Katehrine deCourcy (5/3/2023). They note:

Over the last 40 years, employment among young people has declined by about 7 percentage points while enrollment in school has increased by about 13 percentage points, as shown in Figure B.

These are true statements but do they accurately reflect the trends? Not really, but they clarify this a paragraph later:

Between 1986 and 2012, young people increased their enrollment in high school, college, or university by 19 percentage points from 36% to 55%. Enrollment softened a bit in 2013, then mostly held steady, softening slightly again in the pandemic. As of March 2023, 51.8% of young adults are enrolled in school.

The article is worth reading and there are three other graphs. All the graph have a data link.

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.

The links to resources page has been revamped. For those of you looking for data I think I have made it easier. There is now a box with the type of data in bold and a link. I’ve also added a spatial data box for those looking for data with lat and lon or some other spatial attribute. My goal is to add to both of these boxes over the next year.

All of the statistics projects have also been updated. The graph here is for the U.S. Oil Production project. The black dots, conventional crude oil, are still roughly fitting a normal curve. All of the increase in U.S. oil production is from tight or shale oil. Worth noting.

Feel free to email me and let me know if any of this (regular posts, projects, other) is useful and suggestions for improvement are welcome: thomas.pfaff@sustainabilitymath.org.

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.