I am a big fan of Hans Rosling and his family team who created Gapminder.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

We are a modern “museum” that helps making the world understandable, using the Internet.

Rosling is a God-gifted speaker who tells compelling stories using publicly available data about world health and economy. Using animated graphics tracking data over time and space combined with spoken words (lots of them) and a rich body language Rosling brings data alive.

In this video, Rosling explains the development of health and wealth in 200 countries over 200 years in less than five minutes – and it’s fun too.

Up in the air

I created this graph on the Gapminder website showing CO2 emission in the Nordic countries since 1980.

What is the chart telling you about CO2 emission? Have a click and use the play button to see the animated chart. Then take a moment to play around with the zooming and axis facilities before you answer the question and continue reading.

Gapminder animated chart

Bring in the run charts

There is no doubt that CO2 emission has increased dramatically over the last 200 years. But did you notice that Sweden and Denmark have reduced their CO2 emission by about 50% since 1980? Or that Norway is heading in the wrong direction, while the Faeroe Islands seem to be on the return from a sudden increase during the late 1980’s?

I did not see that until I created this embarrassingly simple graph using old fashioned trelllis run charts to display the development of CO2 emission over time in the six countries.

I you have read my previous articles and posts on run charts, you will know that a run charts is a tool to detect non-random variation over time using simple statistical tests. In my run charts, I mark non-random variation using a red and dashed centre line (median).

In the graph, only Finland and Iceland have a stable (random variation) CO2 emission in the period displayed. The other four show non-random variation and are either increasing or decreasing.

In conclusion, when you ask simple questions of big data and Hans Rosling is not around to perform an interpretation, you might be better off using simple displays of data than multi-dimensional, animated bubble graphs.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery