Introduction

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Overview

Climate change and science has been an issue for discussion and debate for at least the last decade. Climate data collection is currently being collected for areas all over the world. Policy decisions are based on the most recent analysis conducted on data extracted from huge online repositories of this data. Due to the inherent growth in the electronic production and storage of information, there is often a feeling of “information overload” or inundation when facing the process of quantitative decision making. As an analyst your job will often be to explore large data sets and develop questions or ideas from visualizations of those data sets.

The ability to synthesize large data sets using visualizations is a skill that all data scientists should have. In addition to this data scientists are called upon to present data syntheses and develop questions or ideas based on their data exploration. This lab should take you through the major steps in data exploration and presentation.

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Objective

The objective of this laboratory is to survey the available data, plan, design, and create an information dashboard/presentation that not only explores the data but helps you develop questions based on that data exploration. To accomplish this task you will have to complete a number of steps:

  1. Identify what information interests you about climate change.

  2. Find, collect, organize, and summarize the data necessary to create your data exploration plan.

  3. Design and create the most appropriate visualizations (no less than 5 visualizations) to explore the data and present that information.

  4. Finally organize the layout of those visualizations into a dashboard (use the flexdashboard package) in a way that shows your path of data exploration.

  5. Develop four questions or ideas about climate change from your visualizations.

Global Sea Ice Levels

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Histogram

Sea Ice Levels Timeline

Sea Ice Level by Month Boxplot

Sea Ice Level by Year Scatterplot

Emissions

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Carbon Dioxide

Nitrous Oxide

Methane

Questions and Conclusion

Questions/Ideas to Explore

  1. How have global sea ice levels changed over the last few decades? Is this change a result of human action or is it naturally occurring phenomena? A potential future study would be to analyze the differences in sea ice levels by hemisphere in order to pinpoint specific areas that are experiencing significant reductions in ice levels.

  2. Is there a correlation between the annual increase rate of carbon dioxide, nitrus oxide, and methane emissions? To what degree can data from two of these gasses be used to predict the increase in emissions of the third gas?

  3. Has the distribution of sea ice levels by month changed throughout the years? The box plot presented in this dashboard shows the average across the study period, but a potential future study could analyze differences by month through timne. For example, it could be found that ice levels in December have decreased significantly more than in February. If such differences are found, it might be worth to run a study that attempt to explain why that is the case.

  4. Out of all the visualizations presented in this dashboard, which one presents the the most concerning information and what can be done today to reduce the negative impacts it is causing? On a more general level, a ranking could be established listing the most pressing issues presented in this dashboard (sea ice level reduction, increase in carbon dioxide, increase in methane, etc).

Conclusion

By looking at both the emissions and Sea/Ice Level Graphs, we can come to the conclusion that global warming is indeed a significant problem. As we can see in the emissions graphs, all three of Carbon Dioxide, Nitrous Oxide and Methane emissions have increased significantly over the past 30 years, and are one of the biggest causes of global warming. The increased emissions could be impacting the decrease in global sea ice levels that we see in the graphs, which are also major indicators of global warming. The biggest question going forward is what can be done to control some of the impacts caused by this phenomena.