Global Climate Change
Now more than ever before, there is an urgent need to make climate change data accessible to everyone in the general public. This is an important first step in having an informed discussion about ways in which we can contribute to a more sustainable planet in the future. It is not a secret that our climate is changing faster than ever before and the consequences of this change on life are tremendous. Global climate change will have a profound effect on the ocean by altering temperature, CO2-acidification, and dissolved oxygen (DO) in the ocean. The consequences of climate change on land are even more severe than that of the ocean. Longer, more intense droughts threaten crops, wildlife, and freshwater supplies. From polar bears in the Arctic to marine turtles off the coast of Africa, our planet’s diversity of life is at risk from an ever-changing climate (worldwildlife.org). For these reasons, it critical to study how important climate change variables (example Carbon-dioxide and Methane gas emissions) are changing over time and what other factors may be correlated with such variables. It is important to note that though not every country is contributing to climate change, the consequence of the warming planet is global.
There are a great number of data out there showing an association between increased temperatures, rising sea levels, melting polar caps, and other variables indicative of a changing world. We are interested in exploring the global rise in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide gas and methane gas (CO2 and CH4: proxies for climate change) and their strong associations with change in land-temperatures, the size of glaciers, sea level, and change in forest percentage over time.
We plan to achieve following things in this project:
- Visualize the global rise in CO2 and CH4 emmission across time (1880-2010)by countries and region
- Interactive scatter plots
- Importance plots
- Visualize the change in Land-temperature, Sea level, Glacier-Mass, and Forest Area over time (1880-2010)
- Juxtapose the association of rise in green house gases (climate chage) and its consequence in sea level rise, land temperatire rise, decrease in glacier mass, and forest area across the world
How users can get started with the project?
- Climate_Shiny.Rmd is the main shinny app file
- Climaechange-datacleaning.Rmd is the data cleaning code
- Download all the files and change the directories of the datasets as you read in the csv files in the two Rmd files metioned above
- First, run Climaechange-datacleaning.Rmd and then Climate_Shiny.Rmd
