Week 2: Climate Change - Unequal Responsibility, Shared Impact

The Narrative: From Human Habit to Planetary Impact
This report tracks the journey from how we live (individual emissions) to what we have built (historical legacy), ending with the physical bill the planet is currently paying. The narrative structure moves from individual carbon intensity (per capita) to the cumulative historical burden, concluding with the observable impact on the global climate system.

 

The Challenge: Making a Logical Jump
The biggest challenge was connecting the dots between two very different types of data. Chapters 1 and 2 look at specific countries and regions, while Chapter 3 looks at the planet as a whole. To make this transition work, the report shifts from looking at where emissions happen to what they eventually do to the Earth. It frames the global temperature and sea level changes as the combined physical "receipt" for all that regional activity we looked at earlier.

 

Chapter 1 - The Current State. This chapter uses a world map to visualize the wide range in per capita CO₂ emissions across nations.

 

Chapter 2 - The Trajectory. A line chart and a continental heatmap track 174 years of emission shifts, capturing how regional trajectories have diverged over time, from the Early Industrial Era to the Paris Agreement.

 

Chapter 3 - The Collective Impact. This final section shifts to planetary outcomes, using a 10-year lag and 0-100 normalization to align temperature anomalies with rising sea levels.

 

Technical Notes

0–100 Normalization: Comparing degrees Celsius directly to millimeters is not mathematically sound. Normalization was used to rescale both variables to a 0–100 range, allowing for a precise visual comparison of their relative trajectories and rates of change over the 174-year timeline.

 

10-Year Temporal Lag: A 10-year lag was applied to the sea level data to account for the physical response time of the climate system. This adjustment aligns the atmospheric "cause" with the oceanic "effect" on a shared horizontal axis, making the coupled relationship between the two indicators visible.

 

*Please note this entry has been previously submitted via a wrong email address. This is my official entry.