The NASA article Can’t ‘See’ Sea Level Rise? You’r looking in the Wrong Place by Alan Buis (5/13/2020) combines the quantitative facts of sea level rise with stories of places feeling the impact. “Thanks to satellite and tide gauge data, we know that sea level is rising about 3.3 millimeters …
Read More »How should we measure COVID-19 deaths?
The CDC’s new webpage Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19 provides one method to measure pandemic related deaths: Estimates of excess deaths presented in this webpage were calculated using Farrington surveillance algorithms (1). For each jurisdiction, a model is used to generate a set of expected counts, and the upper bound …
Read More »Are COVID-19 deaths moving to the rest of the U.S.?
TPM put together a number of graphs comparing the NYC metro area to the rest of the country in their article Distinguishing the NYC Metro Outbreak from the Rest of the Country by Josh Marshall (5/6/2020). The NYC metro area was hit early and hard by COVID-19, but will it …
Read More »How has U.S. population changed since 2010?
The Census Bureau report Last Census Population Estimates of the Decade (4/6/2020) has a great interactive graphic of U.S. population change for each state. The image here is what it looks like and if you scroll over a state the data is highlighted in the other graphs. Overall, The U.S. …
Read More »Where can I make a map of U.S. energy systems?
The eia has an new U.S. Energy Mapping System. You can choose from numerous energy type. The map here was created by choosing coal mines and coal power plants (the black circles with the white triangles are coal power plants. You can zoom in and out of the map and …
Read More »How hot was March 2020?
From the NOAA Global Climate Report – March 2020: Averaged as a whole, the global land and ocean surface temperature for March 2020 was 1.16°C (2.09°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F) and the second highest in the 141-year record. Only March 2016 was warmer at 1.31°C (2.36°F). …
Read More »How does C-19 deaths compare to other causes of deaths in the U.S.?
Here is an excellent animated visualization of daily deaths of C-19 as compared to other leading causes of deaths in the U.S. This chart stops at April 14. According to Worldometers here are the number of daily deaths from April 15 through April 22: 2618, 2176, 2538, 1867, 1561, 1939, …
Read More »How do we know 12,000 years of climate?
The Climate.gov article Nature’s archives: piecing together 12,000 years of Earth’s climate story by Alison Stevens (4/15/2020) provides an overview of paleoclimate proxies and links to a new database of these records. Paleoclimate proxies indirectly record climate and atmospheric conditions present when they formed or grew; air bubbles in ice cores sample …
Read More »Urban/Rural Red/Blue?
FiveThirtyEight has the interesting graph copied here from their article How Urban or Rural is Your State? And What Does That Mean For The 2020 Election? by Nathaniel Rakich (4/14/2020). How did they measure urbanization? Essentially, we calculated the average number of people living within a five-mile radius of every …
Read More »How have wages grown since 1979?
The EPI article State of Working America Wages 2019 by Elise Gould (2/20/2020) provides a detailed summary of wage growth. For example, copied here is the third of over 20 charts. Note that he bottom 10 percent is barely above 0 and only recently got there. A related fact from …
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