BW #88: Hot summers
If you live in the northern hemisphere, then you've likely started to feel the weather getting cooler over the last few weeks. I wouldn't say that the weather in Israel has gotten cold, but it's definitely nice to be able to sit outside for lunch, rather than remain inside, next to an air conditioner.
It's not unusual for summers to be hot, but the people at Climate Central (https://www.climatecentral.org), an organization aimed at explaining climate change to the general public, recently released a report and data showing that this summer was particularly hot. Their data describes just how hot the weather was, but also how much hotter than usual this summer's temperatures were than before.
As the CEO of Climate Central, Ben Strauss, explained on the Slate Political Gabfest podcast last week (https://slate.com/podcasts/political-gabfest/2024/10/election-kamala-harris-donald-trump-vote-hurricane-milton-helene-climate-change-legal-win), the hot weather is raising water temperatures to never-before-seen levels, what he described as "hot tub temperature in the open ocean." Since hot water powers hurricanes, it's not surprising that we're seeing more powerful, destructive storms than ever before.
The data all points to climate change as the reason for increased temperatures. But it would seem that meteorologists who mention that as a reason for the huge storms are receiving threats (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/meteorologists-threats-conspiracy-theories-hurricanes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU4.uwM2.zFc50u9q7LVB&smid=url-share).
This week, we'll look at the data set released by Climate Central, and try to understand where June-to-August (aka "summer," to many of us) temperatures have changed the most (and least) over the last 50 years.
Data and seven questions
This week, we'll look at the data set from Climate Central. Their summary of the data is from this page:
https://www.climatecentral.org/report/people-exposed-to-climate-change-june-august-2024
The data itself can be downloaded via the "Download data" link at the bottom of the page (i.e., the final bullet point), which links to the following URL:
This week, I have seven tasks and questions for you. The learning goals are working with Excel data, multi-indexes, column names, grouping, and plotting.
I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions, including the Jupyter notebook I used to solve these problems:
- Read the Excel file into a Pandas data frame. We want a three-level multi-index, with the continent, region, and country names.
- The column names are rather long. Shorten or remove repetitive (or unnecessary) text. For example, you can replace the text "Climate Shift Index level 2 (heat made 2x more likely by climate change)" with "CS2".
