| Hey folks, This week I have an interesting figure for you from the Financial Times from an e-mail newsletter they distribute each week describing some visualization related to climate change. Before reading further, go ahead and spend a few minutes with the image. What does it say to you? What do you like? What don’t you like about it? How do you think you would go about making it in R? I’d encourage you to write down any of your answers to these questions before reading what I have to say. It would be awesome if you could send me your responses just to get a sense of what other people see (feel free to reply to this email!) What does it say to me? I like the declarative title that “China accounts for almost a third of the current global emissions with a cumulative share of 16%”. What do you like? I’m not a huge fan of stacked area plots, but they did a nice job of focusing on a set of countries/regions of interest. Too often I see people try to include too many categories leading to too many colors, which makes it impossible to know which color belongs to each country. What don’t you like? All that being said, I think the legend could have been better embedded into the panels so that one doesn’t have to scan back and forth. Also, the colors are basically reddish and greenish. I get that EU27, Russia, and UK are all European-ish and could be similar colors. But why are China and US similar colors? In addition to labelling the areas directly, I’d try to pick five distinct colors. How would I make this in R? Good question! I can think of a hack approach and a more elegant approach. The hack would be to create two sets of data that are either scaled by year or over the past 175 years. Then I would use  The more elegant approach would be to use  Regardless of the approach to making the two panels, each panel has a stacked area plot. We can use  Happily, I was able to find the data! If you go to the data hub of the Global Carbon Budget, we can download an  To get the data into R, I’d use the  This would be my general approach. What did you come up with? Any preference for trying to do this with  
 
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Hey folks! I posted two videos last week! On Monday I posted a video critiquing the diverging bar plot that I described in this newsletter last Friday. My goal in this video was to think through a “constructive” approach to interpreting and critiquing data visualizations. As scientists, I think we are too worried about hurting each other’s feelings. So we don’t critique each other. At the same time, many of us think before we speak and can come off overly harsh. My goal is to create a...
Hey folks! As I’m writing this newsletter the US government is in shutdown mode with no clear signs that things will get going anytime soon. I’ll withhold my own political take except to say that my family has been running without an official budget for about 25 years. I don’t recommend it, but we know basically how much money goes to our mortgage, insurance, groceries, charities, etc. and how much money we generally have left over. Somehow we still are able to spend money on living a pretty...
Hey folks! This week I have a figure for you from the New York Times based on a poll they did with Siena that describes Americans’ sentiments concerning Israel’s actions in their war with Gaza. What does it say to me? This plot is saying that more Americans think that Israel is intentionally killing civilians than they did in December 2023. The change in percentage of people in the other categories seems to decrease accordingly. What do you like? I love slope plots! I think they’re a great...