Some People Never Had Experience with…

Air is an art project by Marina Vitaglione and written about by the BBC. The project seeks to raise awareness of the air pollution in and around London. She used cyanotypes to capture the pollution in the area. She collected evidence of the pollution in circular areas on paper and then exposed them as cyanotypes.

Cyanotypes work by exposing a piece of paper coated in a substance that, when exposed to sunlight, turns blue. The parts protected from sunlight, in this case the pollution, stay their original colour and you are left with what here is air pollution.

Where is that protection that I needed?

This screenshot from the article compares the air pollution in Lewisham on the left to Wembley on the right. As the author explained in the article the “aesthetic, the cyan-blue tone of cyanotypes remind me of pure, cloudless skies, contrasting with the vision of grey clouds we have when we think of air pollution”.

If you want to read more about the process or see more examples of her artwork, I recommend reading through the BBC article. Or, for my London readers, you can see the artwork in person as part of the Koppel Project Exchange’s show What on Earth.

Credit for the piece goes to Marina Vitaglione.

Hot and Not So Hot Graphics

Thankfully today’s forecast calls for cooler temperatures. Your author is not a fan of hot weather, which means being outside in summer is…less than ideal. It also means that the air conditioner runs frequently and on high for a few months. (Conversely, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I turned on the heat this winter.)

The problem is, the two biggest contributors to US carbon emissions? Heating/cooling and transport. In other words, heating your home in the winter, cooling it in the summer, and then driving your non-electric vehicle.

After the recent heatwave in New England, the Boston Globe examined the impact of the heatwave on the environment. The article led with the claim it used four charts to do so. I quibble with that distinction because this is a screenshot of the second graphic.

Illustrating is hard

I mean, it’s not prose text. Rather, we have three factettes paired with illustrations. At the top of this post, I mentioned the impact of transport for a reason. In an ideal world, in order to get carbon emissions under control one of the changes we would need to see is getting people out of their personal automobiles and into mass transit. Subways and light rail are far cleaner and can actually be cheaper for households than car ownership. And so we should be encouraging their use and building more of them.

Look above and you’ll see an icon of a subway car. Except it’s not. The graphic/factette is actually talking about rail cars full of coal that transport fuel from mine to generating station. Those look more like this, from James St. James via Wikimedia Commons.

Small, subtle details matter. And so I’d propose a new icon that tries to capture the industrial coal train, ideally something that I spent more than five minutes on.

Illustrating is still hard

But it breaks the linkage between passenger train and coal train, which is not ideal for the purposes of an article highlighting the environmental impacts of US households.

That all said, the article did a really good job with the other graphics it used. My favourite was this chart, decidedly not a combination chart.

Making charts can also be hard, though

It looks at the correlation between high temperatures and energy usage. But, instead of lazily throwing the temperatures atop the bars, the designers more carefully placed them below the energy usage chart. The top chart should look familiar to those who have been following my Covid-19 charts, a daily number that then has the rolling seven-day average plotted above it to smooth out any one-day quirks. The designer then chose to highlight the heatwave in red.

For temperatures, I like the overall approach. But I wonder if a more nuanced approach could have taken the graph a step farther to excellent. Presently we have a single red line representing daily average high temperature. But in the plot above we use red to indicate the heat wave of early June, five consecutive days of temperatures in excess of 90ºF. What if that line were black or grey or some neutral colour, and then only the heatwave was coloured in red? It would more clearly link the two together. And it avoids the trap of red implying heat, when you need to only go back to late May when the East Coast had early spring like temperatures near 50ºF, decidedly not red on a temperature scale.

Overall, though, it’s refreshing to see a thoughtful approach taken here instead of the usual slapdash throw one chart atop the other.

And the rest of the article uses restrained, smart graphics as well. Bar charts and small multiples to capture air pollution and EMS calls. You should read the full article for the insights and the feedback loops we have.

After all, it’s not that the heating/cooling is itself the problem, especially since the removal of CFCs since the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that banned those pesky chemicals that harm the ozone layer—remember when that was the big environmental issue in the 1990s? The issue is how we generate the electricity that powers the heating/cooling systems—and if you want to use electric cars, whence comes their electric charge—as if we’re using coal plants, that just exacerbates the problem. But if we use carbon-less plants, e.g. nuclear, solar, or wind, we’re not generating carbon emissions.

Credit for the piece goes to John Hancock.

Discontinuous Lead Bars

Last week the Guardian published an article about drinking water pollution across the United States. Overall, it was a nicely done piece and the graphics within segmented the longer text into discrete sections. Each unit looks similar:

PFAs.

The left focuses on a definition and provides contextual information. It includes small illustrations of the mechanisms by which the pollutant enters the water system. To the right is a chart showing the levels of the contamination detected in the 120 tests the Guardian (and its partner Consumer Reports) conducted.

In almost all of the charts, we see the maximum depicted on the y-axis. And the bars are coloured if that observation station exceeds the health and safety limits. (The limit is represented by the dotted line.)

But towards the end of the piece we get to lead, a particularly problematic pollutant. There is no safe level of lead contamination. But how the piece handles the lead chart leaves a bit to be desired.

But how bad is it, really?

The first thing is colour, but that’s okay. Everything is red, but again, there is no safe level of lead so everything is over the limit. But look at the y-axis. That little black line at the top indicates a discontinuity in the lines, in other words the values for those three observations are literally off the chart.

But does that work?

First, this kind of thing happens all the time. If you ever have to work with data on either China or India, you’ll often find those two nations, due to their sheer demographic size, skew datasets that involve people. But in these kind of situations, how do we handle off the charts data points?

There is a value to including those points. It can show how extreme of an outlier those observations truly are. In other words, it can help with data transparency, i.e. you’re not trying to hide data points that don’t fit the narrative with which you’re working.

In this piece, it’s never explicitly stated what the largest value in the data set is, but I interpret it as being 5.8. So what happens if we make a quick chart showing a value of 6 (because it’s easier than 5.8)? I added a blue bar to distinguish it from the the rest of the chart.

It’s pretty bad.

You can see that including the data point drastically changes how the chart looks. The number falls well outside the graphic, but it also shows just how dangerously high that one observation truly is.

But if you say, well yeah, but that falls outside the box allowed by the webpage, you’re correct. There are ways it could be handled to sit outside the “box”, but that would require some extra clever bits. And this isn’t a print layout where it’s much easier to play with placement. So what happens when we resize that graphic to fit within its container?

And resized

You can see that All the other bars become quite small. And this is probably why the designers chose to break the chart in the first place. But as we’ve established, in doing so they’ve minimised the danger of those few off-the-charts sites as well as left off context that shows how for the vast majority of sites, the situation is not nearly as dire—though, again, no lead is good lead.

What else could have been done? If maintaining the height of the less affected bars was paramount, the designers had a few other options they could have used. First, you could exclude those observations and perhaps put a line below the 118 text that says “for three sites, the data was off the charts and we’ve excluded them from the set below.”

I have used that approach in the past, but I use it with great reluctance. You are removing important outliers from the data set and the set is not complete without them. After all, if you are looking to use this data set to inform a policy choice such as, which communities should receive emergency funding to reduce lead levels, I’d want to start with the city in blue. Sure, I would like everyone to get money, but we’d have to prioritise resources.

I think the best compromise here would have actually been a small tweak to the original. Above the three bars that are broken (or perhaps to the right with some labelling), label the discontinuous data points to provide clearer context to the vast majority of the sites, which are below 0.5 ppb.

As easy as ABC

This preserves the ability to easily compare the lower level observations, but provides important context of where they sit within the overall data set by maintaining the upper limits of the worst offenders.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian’s graphics department.

Auto Emissions Stuck in High Gear

The last two days we looked at densification in cities and how the physical size of cities grew in response to the development of transport technologies, most notably the automobile. Today we look at a New York Times article showing the growth of automobile emissions and the problem they pose for combating the greenhouse gas side of climate change.

The article is well worth a read. It shows just how problematic the auto-centric American culture is to the goal of combating climate change. The key paragraph for me occurs towards the end of the article:

Meaningfully lowering emissions from driving requires both technological and behavioral change, said Deb Niemeier, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland. Fundamentally, you need to make vehicles pollute less, make people drive less, or both, she said.

Of course the key to that is probably in the range of both.

The star of the piece is the map showing the carbon dioxide emissions on the roads from passenger and freight traffic. Spoiler: not good.

From this I blame the Schuylkill, Rte 202, the Blue Route, I-95, and just all the highways
From this I blame the Schuylkill, Rte 202, the Blue Route, I-95, and just all the highways

Each MSA is outlined in black and is selectable. The designers chose well by setting the state borders in a light grey to differentiate them from when the MSA crosses state lines, as the Philadelphia one does, encompassing parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. A slight opacity appears when the user mouses over the MSA. Additionally a little box remains up once the MSA is selected to show the region’s key datapoints: the aggregate increase and the per capita increase. Again, for Philly, not good. But it could be worse. Phoenix, which surpassed Philadelphia proper in population, has seen its total emissions grow 291%, its per capita growth at 86%. My only gripe is that I wish I could see the entire US map in one view.

The piece also includes some nice charts showing how automobile emissions compare to other sources. Yet another spoiler: not good.

I've got it: wind-powered cars with solar panels on the bonnet.
I’ve got it: wind-powered cars with solar panels on the bonnet.

Since 1990, automobile emissions have surpassed both industry emissions and more recently electrical generation emissions (think shuttered coal plants). Here what I would have really enjoyed is for the share of auto emissions to be treated like that share of total emissions. That is, the line chart does a great job showing how auto emissions have surpassed all other sources. But the stacked chart does not do as great a job. The user can sort of see how passenger vehicles have plateaued, but have yet to decline whereas lorries have increased in recent years. (I would suspect due to increased deliveries of online-ordered goods, but that is pure speculation.) But a line chart would show that a little bit more clearly.

Finally, we have a larger line chart that plots each city’s emissions. As with the map, the key thing here is the aggregate vs. per capita numbers. When one continues to scroll through, the lines all change.

Lots of people means lots of emissions.
Lots of people means lots of emissions.

There's driving in the Philadelphia area, but it's not as bad as it could be.
There’s driving in the Philadelphia area, but it’s not as bad as it could be.

Very quickly one can see how large cities like New York have large aggregate emissions because millions of people live there. But then at a per capita level, the less dense, more sprawl-y cities tend to shoot up the list as they are generally more car dependent.

Credit for the piece goes to Nadja Popovich and Denise Lu.