Team Members: Helena Spencer and Jonathan Nottingham
Global warming has become a prevelant issue in society over the past couple years and is heading in a direction that will eventually be deemed irreverisble. Although there are many factors that can be attributed to this worldwide phenomenon, we chose to observe three main components: energy production, agricultural activity, and deforestation. Energy production has shown to increase globally over the past couple decades leading to more fossil fuel emissions and an increase in greenhouse gases. Agricultural activity, consisting of crop production and meat consumption, also has an increasing trend over the past decades of which both release gases such as methane, carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitrous oxide into the atmoshpere, contributing to climate change. Deforestation, although has recently slowed down, is still at a rate that is impacting global warming since there are not enough trees to significantly clean the air of these greenhouse gases being produced. Through our visualizations, it becomes very obvious that these factors are influencing the current trajectory of our climate and are leading our world to a point of environmental destruction.
ReportThe breakdown of work was split fairly evenly. Since our team only has two members, the best way we could attack this project is by splitting up the work as best as possible. For example, Jonathan did the visualizations for energy production and fossil fuel emissions and the introduction of the observable notebook, the entire report, and half of the video. Helena did the visualizations for agricultural activity and deforestation and the conclusion of the observable notebook, the readme.md file, set up the GitHub items, and the other half of the video. Having only two members, it was a lot to juggle but we did the best that we could.
The first step we took for this project was identifying the factors we wanted to include in our narrative and any other viewpoints of climate change. The factors we originally had are energy production, agricultural activity, deforestation, industrial activity, Earth’s own feedback loop, and variations in the Sun’s intensity. We also had actions that various countries are taking in order to reduce the effects of global warming data points. We determined for the scope of this project we would reduce the number of factors to only energy production, agricultural activity, and deforestation and got rid of other countries' actions since we have a smaller team. After reducing our attributes, we then began creating visualizations for each of the factors. This took a significant amount of time since we kept running into errors in our code and having to format our datasets to function correctly. Once we finished our visualizations, we added commentary on each of the visualizations, an introduction and a conclusion, and then organized our notebook so that it was clean looking and professional. We finished our project by writing the report, creating the readme.md file, linking the GitHub pages, and filming our presentation video.