Introduction
I have a good friend that recently reminded me of his perspective on my work:
I never read your stuff. I don’t have the time. I just watch videos.
Mr I’m2busy ForYou in October 2021
When he told me that, I felt slighted. His dismissive attitude made me realize that it is hard to keep people engaged in your work. Of course, I have known this for a long time since I have been writing this blog for over a decade. It is very hard to maintain readership. We are all busy, and we have only a limited time for activities outside of work and our families.
I experience these same time pressures, so I decided to make a video for him that collapses eight years of global warming investigative work down into an hour. That compression ratio is quite significant, and I intend that the content of this article and the video are both rich and essential.
I am hoping people can find some time to watch the video to learn what I have discovered. I also hope people take advantage of the massive amount of data and dashboards that I have made available in this article.
Background
We all share something in common because we all live on the same planet. Our Earth is a magnificent, complex, and beautiful place to live. We should also realize and never forget that it is fragile, with limited resources, including our atmosphere.
Thoughts on Global Warming
Global warming on Earth is a scary topic because the Earth is currently our only home. The issue of global warming is highly politicized and inflammatory, which adds to its scariness. However, the topic is most scary because very few people feel they can do anything about it.
Just because it seems unlikely for us to make a difference as individuals in reducing global warming impacts, it doesn’t mean that we should ignore what is happening. In my case, I’ve buried myself deep into the data for over eight years to gain a clear and concise understanding of the temperature changes occurring across the Earth. I did this in part to reduce my fears. I wanted to understand the truth about global warming to explain it to my son, now ten years old. I tried to quantify global warming in both space and time very precisely.
We are all subject to the changes (good or bad) in the weather that we all may be incrementally helping to create. We all have to suffer weather-related consequences, whether we like it or not. It doesn’t matter if the changes are due to human activities because changes develop and impact us daily. The good news is that now I can show what the changes look like each day of the year for all parts of Earth with weather monitoring stations. This is what took me eight years to accomplish.
About Eight Years Ago
About eight years ago, I decided to quantify global warming. I wanted to comprehend where and when the weather-related changes have happened. I tried to understand the true magnitude of the changes that I know are occurring because I have seen and experienced them during my lifetime. I focused on analyzing maximum daily temperatures because this variable best represents the changes I have wanted to understand.
At the time I began this work, I had no investigation plan. What I did have, however, was a scientific curiosity and an intense work ethic. I used my experience in science, mathematics, data preparation, and data visualization to perform the work. I also used two great software packages (Alteryx and Tableau) to discover global warming insights.
Although I might have been naive at the time, I wasn’t being narcissistic in this regard because I knew that my skills and work ethic would allow me to complete the mission. I was sure of that. I hoped those skills and software tools would expose insights nobody else has ever quantified. Whether there were any solid insights to share was the only question in my mind.
I knew that doing the work would be challenging and time-consuming based on my career and education. Understanding and predicting weather is a tricky task. To make predictions using decades of weather data scattered across thousands of monitoring stations is essentially a long shot. If it were an easy thing to do, someone else would have already done it.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that it would take years to complete the mission I created. It would take me over eight years to develop the techniques to identify and visualize hidden insights. It would take me about four iterations of data downloads, the development of dozens of Alteryx workflows, and dozens of Tableau dashboards. A successful mission would take a willingness to process trillions of calculations, the writing of computational codes, and doing a lot of thinking. I also did a lot of writing and explaining findings as I went along the journey.
If you want to understand where I am in this process, please set aside an hour to watch the video shown below. I’ve tried to explain what I have learned during this time.
The One Hour Video That Explains My Most Recent Global Warming Work
The Data Used For The Study
If you like this type of data work, I have made the data available to you. In this section, you can download the data in CSV format to import it into your favorite software package(s).
I have zipped the daily files into 12 monthly collections. Each daily CSV data file contains between 1.2 and 1.5 million data points. The Tableau Public dashboard shown below gives you download access to this data.
If you want to understand how I processed the data in July 2021, you can watch this silly video showing me trying to follow my instructions initially written in 2014. The moral of the story: everything with the data changed dramatically, and I had to write new Alteryx workflows to handle the changes!
Thankfully, Alteryx is so easy to use that this wasn’t much of a problem. Thanks to the work of the brilliant James Dunkerley, I was also able to add some mathematical techniques to make the linear modeling analysis possible in a reasonable amount of time. I will document that work in a future article.
Do Your Own Global Warming Experiment With One Day of Data
If you are a Tableau user and are interested in understanding this work, I encourage you to download one day of data in a packaged Tableau workbook. Pick your birthday to see whether global warming has impacted the area where you live. These dashboards include techniques for dynamically creating linear models in Tableau. In a future article, I will document the mathematical methods I used in these dashboards.
Techniques for Replicating Tableau Dashboards
If you are wondering, I didn’t sit here and manually create 365 individual Tableau Dashboards! I made some techniques for replicating Tableau dashboards using Alteryx and DOS batch commands. Watch the videos shown below to find out how that works. Beware: this is a master-class training program in Tableau and Alteryx. You should pay attention to the warnings I have given about protecting the integrity of your original dashboard before attempting the replication procedure!
The Global Warming Animations
I have made several animations of global warming for the USA and the globe. You can find all of them by clicking this link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLupMVLhR3WQuNPUzlUF6d8HJF6Vt2CDO5. An example is shown below for USA-based statistically significant temperature changes.
1980 – 2021 USA Statistically Significant Temperature Changes
Daily Statistically Significant Temperature Changes By Country
Here are a few examples of country-based temperature changes. These are pdf files that contain day-by-day statistically-significant temperature changes that show where the global warming action is occurring. If you pay attention to where you live, and you hear the weather forecasters say: “It’s unseasonably cold or hot today…” you can check these graphics to see if the global warming changes are the cause for this. If you take the time to do this, you will be amazed at the correlations you will find!
USA
Click here to investigate the USA statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.05) by day of the year.
Click here to investigate the USA statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.20) by day of the year. You will notice that I created three panels to show how the most statistically significant results (p<=0.05) compare with less significant results of .05<p<=.1, and .1<p<=0.2. I chose to create these buckets to show how consistent the heating and cooling patterns are across the world, even with less statistical significance in the data.
Australia
Click here to investigate the Australian statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.05) by day of the year.
Click here to investigate the Australian statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.20) by day of the year.
Europe
Click here to investigate the European statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.05) by day of the year.
Russia
Click here to investigate the Russian statistically significant temperature changes (p= 0.05) by day of the year.
If anyone wants the details for their country (and/or state, province), just let me know. I’ll be happy to produce a report for you. It is very easy for me to identify when global warming is most impacting any country because I have created a dashboard that indicates how much of the monthly data is statistically significant. One such example is shown below for February in China.
Final Thoughts
What have I learned?
Although our average warming is less than 2 deg C across the Earth, the localized heating and cooling zones that have developed create the extreme weather events we see on the news. The trend models developed in this work show consistency across space and time. Whether it be the 100+ degree days in the Pacific Northwest in June 2021, the freezing conditions in Texas in February 2021, or the European heatwaves in 2021, these patterns can be understood using this work. We should not be surprised by future intense events because now we can predict their occurrence. That is more than I ever hoped would be possible.
Please consider subscribing to this blog to follow my future work. I want people to be informed about global warming based on actual data, not politicized BS. Global warming (and cooling) is real and is here to stay.
This study is a work in progress, and I still have questions to answer. Please stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
