Sustainability Math A Quantitative Literacy and Mathematics Resource for Instructors

The details of mass incarceration is complicated, but the Prison Policy Initiative report Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019 by Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner (3/19/19) provides an extensive look at the data. The report has over 20 graphs and links to data. A few excerpts:

The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

Every year, over 600,000 people enter prison gates, but people go to jail 10.6 million times each year. Jail churn is particularly high because most people in jails have not been convicted.

People in prison and jail are disproportionately poor compared to the overall U.S. population. The criminal justice system punishes poverty, beginning with the high price of money bail: The median felony bail bond amount ($10,000) is the equivalent of 8 months’ income for the typical detained defendant. As a result, people with low incomes are more likely to face the harms of pretrial detention. Poverty is not only a predictor of incarceration; it is also frequently the outcome, as a criminal record and time spent in prison destroys wealth, creates debt, and decimates job opportunities.

It’s no surprise that people of color — who face much greater rates of poverty — are dramatically over represented in the nation’s prisons and jails. These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents. The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail.

Read the whole report for considerably more information and data.

The eia article U.S. government energy consumption continues to decline by Fred Mayes (7/25/19) has a half dozen charts showing U.S. government energy consumption.  For example, the chart copied here provides energy consumption by defense and civilian agencies by type (vehicles/equipment or buildings).

The U.S. federal government consumed 915 trillion British thermal units (Btu) of energy during the 2017 fiscal year (FY), or 20% less than a decade before. The slight decline in FY 2017 marks the fifth consecutive decline in annual federal government consumption.

To put this in some perspective, the eia article In 2018, the United States consumed more energy then ever before by Allen McFarland (4/16/19) shows that the U.S. consumed almost 100 quadrillion BTUs in 2017.

Primary energy consumption in the United States reached a record high of 101.3 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) in 2018, up 4% from 2017 and 0.3% above the previous record set in 2007.

So, the U.S. government consumes about 1% of overall energy. Both articles have links to the data.

The Our World in Data article More than 8 out of 10 people in the world will live in Asia or Africa by 2100 by Hannah Ritchie (7/15/19) includes the (interactive) chart copied here with population projections by the United Nations.

The United Nations projects that world population growth will slow significantly over the course of the 21st century, coming close to its peak at 10.9 billion by 2100.

The striking change between now and 2100 is the expected growth in the African population. Today, its population is around 1.3 billion; by 2100 it’s projected to more than triple to 4.3 billion.

North, Central and South America, and Oceania, are projected to also see a rise in population this century – but this growth will be much more modest relative to growth in Africa. Europe is the only region where population is expected to fall – today its population stands at around 747 million; by 2100 this is projected to fall to 630 million.

The chart and the data can be downloaded.

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Global Climate Report – June 2019:

Averaged as a whole, the June 2019 global land and ocean temperature departure from average was the highest for June since global records began in 1880 at +0.95°C (+1.71°F). This value bested the previous record set in 2016 by 0.02°C (0.04°F). Nine of the 10 warmest Junes have occurred since 2010. June 1998 is the only value from the previous century among the 10 warmest Junes on record, and it is currently ranked as the eighth warmest June on record. Junes 2015, 2016, and 2019 are the only Junes that have a global land and ocean temperature departure from average above +0.90°C (+1.62°F). June 2019 also marks the 43rd consecutive June and the 414th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.

How about land-only temps?

The global land-only surface temperature for June 2019 was 1.34°C (2.41°F) above the 20th century average. This was also the highest June temperature in the 140-year record, exceeding the previous record of +1.30°C (+2.34°F) set in 2015.

What about Europe?

Europe had its warmest June on record at 2.93°C (5.27°F) above the 1910–2000 average, surpassing the previous record of 1.95°C (3.51°F) set in 2003 by +0.98°C (+1.76°F). June 2019 also marked the first time since continental records began in 1910 that Europe’s June temperature departure from average surpassed the +2.0°C (+3.6°F) mark and nearly reaching +3.0°C (+5.4°F).

That is the way to beat a record. That isn’t a type the record was beat by almost 1°C.

Data for the chart here as well as land only or ocean only can be obtained from the NOAA Climate at a Glance page.

The PEW article In 116th Congress, at least 13% of lawmakers are immigrants or the children of immigrants by A.W. Geiger (1/24/19) provides an overview of the immigrant status of congress. The chart copied here show that the West has a greater number of immigrant or child of immigrant lawmaker.

While at least 13% of voting members in Congress are immigrants or children of immigrants, relatively few of these are foreign born: 13 in the House, and just one – Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii – in the Senate. These 14 immigrant lawmakers represent just 3% of all voting members in both chambers, a slight uptick from recent Congresses but substantially below the foreign-born share of Congresses many decades ago. (For example, about 10% of members in the first and much smaller Congress of 1789-91 were foreign born. About a century later, in the 50th Congress of 1887-89, 8% of members were born abroad, according to a previous analysis.) The current share of foreign-born lawmakers in Congress is also far below the foreign-born share of the United States as a whole, which was 13.5% as of 2016.

The article includes a time series of the percent of foreign-born members in congress dating back to 1789. There is also a chart tracking were the immigrant or children of immigrant congress members are from.

Collectively, 74% of immigrants and children of immigrants in Congress have origins in countries in Europe, Latin America or Asia.

Much smaller shares claim heritage in countries in the Middle East, North America and sub-Saharan Africa – each below 10%.

The NOAA post Assessing the U.S. Climate in June 2019 (7/9/2019) has a quick summary of precipitation. In short, the 12 month contiguous U.S. precipitation record has been broken for the last three months.

In terms of climate change a half a degree Celsius matters a lot. NASA has a two part series A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter and Part 2: Selected Findings of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming both by Alan Buis (6/19/2019). The two part series is visually well done and an excellent example of telling a story on the web (especially part I).

Higher temperature thresholds will adversely impact increasingly larger percentages of life on Earth, with significant variations by region, ecosystem and species. For some species, it literally means life or death.

“What we see isn’t good – impacts of climate change are in many cases larger in response to a half a degree (of warming) than we’d expected,” said Shindell, who was formerly a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. “We see faster acceleration of ice melting, greater increases in tropical storm damages, stronger effects on droughts and flooding, etc. As we calibrate our models to capture the observed responses or even simply extrapolate another half a degree, we see that it’s more important than we’d previously thought to avoid the extra warming between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.”

Read both reports for details.  This two part series could be the basis for a QL course.

The EPI article Congress has never let the federal minimum wage erode for this long by David Cooper (6/17/19) provides the graph here.

June 16th marks the longest period in history without an increase in the federal minimum wage. The last time Congress passed an increase was in May 2007, when it legislated that the minimum wage be raised to $7.25 per hour on July 24, 2009. Since the minimum wage was first established in 1938, Congress has never let it go unchanged for so long.

To get the data for this graph visit The FRED Blog The value(s) of the minimum wage. At the bottom of the page they provide direction on how to recreate the chart with FRED data. Knowing how to do this is valuable and should be incorporated into any statistics or QL course.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has annual reports on fireworks. The 2018 report on the Fireworks Information Center page includes data on injuries. In 2018 64% of injuries were male. From 2003 to 2018 injury rates varied from a low of 2.8 per 100,000 to a high of 4.0 per 100,00. Some facts:

Males experienced an estimated 2.2 fireworks-related, emergency department-treated injuries per 100,000 individuals during the special study period. Females had 1.2 injuries per 100,000 people.

There is not a statistically significant trend detected in the fireworks-related injury estimates from 2003 to 2018.8.

When considering injury rates (number of injuries per 100,000 people), children and young adults had higher estimated rates of injury than the other age groups during the 2018 special study period. Children 10 to 14 years of age had the highest estimated injury rate at 5.2 per 100,000 population. This was followed by 3.1 injuries per 100,000 people from older teens 15 to 19 years of age, and 2.7 injuries per 100,000 people from children 5 to 9 years of age.

The report has a number of tables with data and the report could easily be used in a statistics or QL course.

The Inside Climate news article Permafrost is Warming Around the World, Study Shows – That’s a Problem for Climate Change by Bob Berwyn (1/16/19) reports on the Nature Communications paper Permafrost is warming at a global scale by Boris K. Biskaborn et. el. (1/16/19). From the article:

Detailed data from a global network of permafrost test sites show that, on average, permafrost regions around the world—in the Arctic, Antarctic and the high mountains—warmed by a half degree Fahrenheit between 2007 and 2016.

The most dramatic warming was found in the Siberian Arctic, where temperatures in the deep permafrost increased by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Why does this matter? It creates a feedback loop:

By some estimates, the Arctic permafrost contains enough carbon to nearly double the amount of CO2 currently in the Earth’s atmosphere. A rapid meltdown would be disastrous because it could release a lot of CO2—in addition to methane, a powerful short-lived climate pollutant—to the atmosphere, where it would cause additional warming, said Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University.

There are more graphs in the paper and a link to the data. The Guardian has a recent related article Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted (6/18/19)

Related posts:
Melting Permafrost and a Feedback Loop
Methane Bubbles – A Feedback Loop
How are beavers creating a climate feedback loop?