The St. Louis Fed post, Healthier Countries, if Not Wealthier Countries by Guillaume Vandenbroucke (12/26/2019) notes The income gap between rich and poor countries doesn’t seem to be closing. In fact, it seems to be getting wider. However, the gaps between these groups of countries when it comes to health …
Read More »What is the role of nuclear energy related to carbon emissions?
The IEA report Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System (May 2019) has this to say: Nuclear power has avoided about 55 Gt of CO2 emissions over the past 50 years, nearly equal to 2 years of global energy-related CO2 emissions. However, despite the contribution from nuclear and the rapid …
Read More »How are household numbers changing?
The Our World in Data post, The rise of living alone: how one-person households are becoming increasingly common around the world by Esteban Oritz-Ospina (12/10/2019), provides the chart copied here. National income per capita and the share of one-person households are strongly correlated… These correlations are partly due to the …
Read More »What progress has been made in the poorest countries?
The World Bank Blog post Chart: Two decades of progress in the world’s poorest countries by Donna Barne (12/11/2019) provides the chart copied here. The last two decades have seen significant progress in many of the world’s poorest countries. The extreme poverty rate fell from more than 50% to about 30%. …
Read More »Is the Arctic “greening”?
One section of NOAA’s Arctic Report Card: Update for 2019 is on Tundra Greenness. The graph here from their report is for maximum NDVI: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which is sensitive to the unique properties of photosynthetically-active vegetation in the Red and Near Infrared wavelengths. NDVI is highly …
Read More »Got water?
A 2016 article in Nature, The world’s road to water scarcity: shortage and stress in the 20th century and pathways towards sustainability by M. Kummu et. a., looks at water scarcity and shortages (The dotted red line in the graph copied here is the proportion of the population dealing with …
Read More »How do we learn about how currents transfer heat in the ocean?
The NASA Vital Signs of the Planet article Seal Takes Ocean Heat Transport Data to New Depth by Esprit Smith (12/4/2019) explains (note photo from the article): But how the current transfers heat, particularly vertically from the top layer of the ocean to the bottom layers and vice versa, is …
Read More »How is U.S. life expectancy changing?
The Economist’s daily chart Why are Americans’ lives getting shorter? (11/27/19) provides the graphic copied here. After climbing gradually over the past half century, life expectancy in America reached a plateau in 2010 and then fell for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017, the latest for which data are …
Read More »What is the leading cause of child mortality?
The article by Our World in Data, Pneumonia – no child should die from a disease we can prevent, by Bernadeta Dadonaite (11/12/19) reports: Every 39 seconds a child dies from pneumonia. 5.4 million children under five years old died in 2017. Pneumonia was the cause of death of one-in-seven …
Read More »How hot was October 2019?
From the NOAA Global Climate Report – October 2019 page: The combined global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average for October 2019 was the second highest for October in the 140-year record at 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th century average 14.0°C (57.1°F). This value is just 0.06°C (0.11°F) …
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