Sustainability Math A Quantitative Literacy and Mathematics Resource for Instructors

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 of the 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI) of these expected counts is used as a threshold to estimate excess deaths. Observed counts are compared to these upper bound estimates to determine whether a significant increase in deaths has occurred. Provisional counts are weighted to account for potential underreporting in the most recent weeks. However, data for the most recent week(s) are still likely to be incomplete. Only about 60% of deaths are reported within 10 days of the date of death, and there is considerable variation by jurisdiction.

The interactive graphics allows the user to choose a jurisdiction and different data types. The graph here is for the U.S. and weekly excess deaths. All data can be downloaded as a csv file.

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 end up a unique hot spot in the U.S. or will the rest of the country be hit similarly? Given the size of the U.S. we really can’t even compare U.S. states to European countries. Time will tell, but this data is worth keeping in mind.

The data for COVID-19 deaths by county in the U.S. from Johns Hopkins is here. The data is updated daily.

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. population was at 328.2 million on July 1, 2019, up 0.48% since July 1, 2018. Growth has slowed every year since 2015, when the population increased 0.73% relative to the previous year.

The three states with the most growth were Texas (3,849,790), Florida (2,673,173) and California (2,257,704). The District of Columbia had the highest percentage change (17.3%), followed by Utah, Texas and Colorado.

Four states have lost population since the 2010 Census: Vermont (-1,748), Connecticut (-8,860), West Virginia (-60,871) and Illinois (-159,751).

The article and graphic are an excellent QL resources. Also, the data is cited at the bottom and the Census Bureau posts all of its data.

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 add country or congressional district boundary lines.

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). The 10 warmest Marches have all occurred since 1990, with Marches of 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020 having a global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average above 1.0°C (1.8°F). The March 2020 global land and ocean surface temperature departure tied with February 2020 and December 2015 as the third highest monthly temperature departure from average in the 1,683-month record. Only February and March 2016, when a strong El Niño was present in the tropical Pacific Ocean, had higher temperature departures.

Data for the graph here.

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 past carbon dioxide levels, pollen and undecayed plant matter reveal growing conditions, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes in marine fossils indicate ocean temperatures. Proxies can come from all over the world — from glaciers in Antarctica to the tropical oceans — and compiling them into datasets can help place today’s warming climate into the context of a longer history.

The article links to the Nature post A global database of Holocene paleotemperature records with the data source at NOAA’s Temperature 12k Database.

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 census tract and took the natural logarithm to create an “urbanization index,” or a calculation of how urban or rural a given area is.

The article has a table of data that goes with the graph and they look at the 2020 election if urbanization dictated the outcome.

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 their previous  chart:

 As shown in Figure B, the top 1% of earners saw cumulative gains in annual wages of 157.8% between 1979 and 2018—far in excess of economywide productivity growth and over six times as fast as average growth for the bottom 90% (23.9%). Over the same period, top 0.1% earnings grew 340.7%.

Each chart has avaialbe data.

The picture here is a snapshot from an animation by NASA in the article Visualizing the Quantities of Climate Change – Ice Sheet Loss in Greenland and Antarctica by Matt Conlen (3/9/2020) that shows a gigatonne of ice. A gigatonne isn’t much since

Satellite data show that Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass at a rate of 283 gigatonnes per year and 145 gigatonnes per year, respectively.

There are three animations one for 1 gigatonne, 5,000 gigatonnes (about the amount lost from the polar ice caps from 2002-2017), and 49,000 gigatones (estimate of the amount lost in the 20th century). Each animation also has an associated math box for the related calculation.