Global Climate Change

By: Neill Chua & Patrick Moraitis

What is Climate Change?

• The gradual increase in the global temperature.
• Natural events and human activities are believed to be contributing to an increase in average global temperatures.
• This is caused primarily by increases in “greenhouse” gases such as Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

Greenhouse Gases

• Temperature of the Earth is determined by the balance between the input from energy from the Sun and the reflection of some of this energy back into space
• Greenhouse Gases trap some of the heat reflected back to the sun
• Massive increase in recent years due to Global Warming

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Causes of Climate Change

• Burning of Fossil fuels
• ⅘ of global carbon dioxide emissions come from energy production, transport, and industrial processes
• Emissions not equal around the world
• More developed countries produce much more
• North America, Europe, Asia

Causes of Climate Change cont.

• Land Use Changes
• Ex: deforestation for the purposes of agriculture, urbanization, or roads
• Happens more in developing countries
• Most developed countries did this in the industrial revolution

What can be done?

• Target major research universities to help find better ways to go into developing cheap and clean energy production, as all economic development is based on increasing energy usage
• $1 trillion spent on Iraq war, but only $1 billion going into global warming issues
• Increase on developing “Renewable Energy Sources”
• Reduce the waste of energy being spent on the development of society

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Interactive Data Visualization

• Highlights key locations around the world and visualizes how much its current temperature deviates from historical averages or records for the current day
• Uses symbols and color to represent data which can be clicked for data summary
• Uses up to the minute live data from Weather Underground API
• Key locations include:
• ~50 of thee most populated cities & major world cities
• ~15 places with the lowest recorded temperatures on earth (-30F & below)
• ~15 places with the highest recorded temperatures on earth (100F & above)

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Audience

• Our main audience ranges from everyday people who have an interest in Global Climate Change to the expert scientific research community.
• We want people to use this project as a springboard to begin engaging with the global warming phenomenon in a subjective environment.
• Primarily raw data presented in a digestible way that isn’t biased, allowing people to create their own ideas on this pressing global social issue
• Eventually, we want to be able to implement our project to bigger corporations or even the government in helping aid with understanding which areas around the world have the biggest climate change problems.

Data Visualization Iterations

We explored several map libraries, weather data APIs, and more.

You can see our detailed preliminary progress reports here

• http://nc-data-visualization.tumblr.com/post/134924457119/final-project-email &
• http://patrickmoraitis.blogspot.com/2015/12/data-visualization-post-9-final-project.html

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How did we make it?

• Cesium, an open-source JS library for 3D maps
• Google sheets to store location data and create feeds
• Weather Underground API for current temperature and almanac data

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Next Steps

• Add historical weather data to show long term trends (but this is not as easy/affordable to obtain as current data)
• Possibly save multiple days’ worth of data, and show in a different visualization how the weather changes over a period of day and whether that period of time still has a regular deviation.
• Add more & refine current locations, but no more than 99 due to API limits
• Allow user to enter and retrieve weather data for custom location
• Open source to developer community and get expert data & weather scientists involved

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