Sustainability Math A Quantitative Literacy and Mathematics Resource for Instructors

The Bloomberg article The End of Snow Threatens to Upend 76 Million American Lives by Baker et. el. (8/3/2022) has some excellent graphs, such as the one copied here, and overview of the water issues in the west.

The West’s mountain snowpacks have shrunk, on average, 23% between 1955 and 2022. By the end of the 21st century, California could lose as much as 79% of its peak snowpack by water volume.

This impacts all of the US:

The California Rice Commission says only about half of the 500,000 acres of rice typically planted in the state will be grown this year.

California alone accounts for a third of all vegetables grown in the US and two-thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts.

The article includes a map of CA with charts of current reservoir levels as well as a couple of then and now photos. The data seems to come from the California Data Exchange Center.

To answer the question Berkeley Earth has an interactive, What is your country’s carbon trend?, where you select a country and you get a table of information and a graph, such as the one copied here. The table of information provides such facts as the U.S. emits 14.2 tonnes per person per year, is the 14th highest, and is 3.2x the world average.  On the other hand, the U.S. cumulative emissions (1850-2020) is 416,723 million tonnes and is the 1st highest.  The  nice part about the interactive is there is a link to the data on the graph.

The link is the same as the post from last Thursday, How much has your country warmed?, and this interactive is just a bit further down the page.

The Berkeley Earth page Actionable Climate Science for Policymakers has a Country-Level Warming Projections interactive graphic. Select a country and a graph, such as the one here for the U.S. appears. Click on the button below the graph,  View More Details, and you will get extra text information and links to download the graph and the data.

As for the U.S. Berkeley Earth tells us the country has already warmed 1.7 deg C and headed for around 4.3 deg C by 2100,

This post is a bit of shameless self promotion, but since many of you that read this are in higher ed I thought you’d appreciate my post, Campuses Need Collaborative Decision-making More than Shared Governance, on the AAUP Academe blog. Feel free to click the link, leave a comment, and share with friends.  A highlight:

In “Exactly what is ‘Shared Governance’” Gary Olson offers, “The key to genuine shared governance is broad and unending communication. When various groups of people are kept in the loop and understand what developments are occurring within the university, and when they are invited to participate as true partners, the institution prospers.” I argue further that this is more than shared governance and that there are four key hierarchical leadership aspects that are needed to ensure this collaborative partnership: shared governance, transparency, openness, and collaboration.

Back to data and graphs on Thursday.

I’m sharing this Washington Post article,  Britain’s freakish heat demolishes records. Here’s what happened, because they have inserted this excellent graphic from Robert Rhode of Berkeley Earth. The graph says it all, but if you prefer words:

The maximum temperature reached Tuesday in Coningsby, England — 130 miles north of London — was unlike anything the village had ever observed. It was an outlier in the truest sense: about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) above the previous highest temperature.

You’ll find a couple of similar images on the Berkeley Earth’s Temperature Updates page. They are just as startling. Consider what it would be like if where you live hit 9 degrees about the current record high.

Here is one of a fun set of maps from the post Where is there more livestock than people? by the Data Stuff blog. The article links to the USDA site used to obtain the data. There are 7 other maps which are fun. One of them is a map of counties with more goats than people. Find out where.

From NOAA’s June 2022 Global Climate Report:

The global surface temperature for June 2022 was the sixth-highest in the 143-year record at 0.87°C (1.57°F) above the 20th century average. This month was also 0.08°C (0.14°F) cooler than the warmest June on record set in 2019. The ten warmest Junes have all occurred since 2010. June 2022 also marked the 46th consecutive June and the 450th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.

Highlights:

The city of Isesaki, which is located in Japan’s Gunma prefecture, had a maximum temperature of 40.1°C (104.2°F) on June 25, 2022 — a new national maximum temperature record for June. This also marked the first time Japan had a maximum temperature of 40.0°C (104.0°F) in June and was only 1.0°C (1.8°F) cooler than the all-time record of 41.1°C (106.0°F).

Data available at the top of the page.

The climate.gov article Moose tracks through Alaska and ENSO  by Brian Brettschneider (6/23/2022) is a great example of using statistics in a real world setting; in this case the Pearson correlation. The graph copied here is interesting but the footnote may be even more so:

This statistical analysis uses the Pearson correlation of a linear regression, which measures how well two variables (like ENSO and Alaskan temperature) remain in sync. Correlation values range from -1 (completely out of sync) to +1 (completely in sync). Also, because Alaska’s temperatures have such a strong warming trend, the anomaly for each year was compared against a trailing 30-year average (or climatology). This mostly, but not entirely, removes the trend. We are interested in removing the climate trend in these maps because we are interested in isolating the ENSO signal (which does not include climate change signals).

Quick summary of the results:

The winter and spring seasons have the greatest connection between ENSO (as measured by the Oceanic Niño Index) and departures from average air temperature, and the correlation is positive. This means that El Niño tends to bring above-average temperatures; it also means La Niña is linked with below-average temperatures. Areas adjacent to and closer to the North Pacific Ocean tend to have a stronger connection with ENSO than areas inland. In the summer, the relationship weakens quite a bit (as indicated by the lighter shading) and is mostly nonexistent by fall.

The Oceanic Niño Index links to a data set. There are a few other maps in the article and a couple more footnotes.

The Our World in Data article How does the land use of different electricity sources compare? by Hannah Ritchie (6/16/2022) looks to answer this question. Here is what they consider:

To capture the whole picture we compare these footprints based on life-cycle assessments. These cover the land use of the plant itself while in operation; the land used to mine the materials for its construction; mining for energy fuels, either used directly (i.e. the coal, oil, gas, or uranium used in supply chains) or indirectly (the energy inputs used to produce the materials); connections to the electricity grid; and land use to manage any waste that is produced.

The answer: Nuclear power.

At the bottom of the article there are links to other energy posts some of which have data.

The Pew article How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades by Rakesh Kochhar and Stella Sechopoulos (4/20/2022) has seven facts about changes in the middle class. Overall  though,

The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

where middle class is defined as

In this analysis, “middle-income” adults in 2021 are those with an annual household income that was two-thirds to double the national median income in 2020, after incomes have been adjusted for household size, or about $52,000 to $156,000 annually in 2020 dollars for a household of three.

The chart here is from fact 4: Married adults and those in multi-earner households made more progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021 than their immediate counterparts.

Generally, partnered adults have better outcomes on a range of economic outcomes than the unpartnered. One reason is that marriage is increasingly linked to educational attainment, which bears fruit in terms of higher incomes.

The article includes a detailed methodology section.