 Hi, I'm John Meiskens and I'm a journalist at the Washington Post. I use data and graphics to cover climate change Or at least that was true up until shortly after I learned that my talk was accepted to this conference Just like it's been for a lot of us My life has changed a lot in the past couple months. I am very fortunate. I should say my health has been not impacted I have a job that I can do well Without endangering my health and that is a real privilege that I know a lot of people and particularly a lot of journalists don't have right now But it has been all hands-on deck covering COVID-19 Which has been a bit strange to jump into I Wiser people than I have written a lot about the intersection of climate change, COVID, how they're similar, how they're different But it felt silly not to say something about this. It's taking up so much of my mental space and all of our mental space at the moment I think That In some ways it's similar to covering climate change covering COVID-19 as a beat Has been similar because it is a universal story. It impacts every era, every Facet of our lives and so almost whatever we were covering before we can say some extent how COVID-19 is impacting it So I chose this title for my talk before We knew that COVID-19 was going to be something that impacted the entire world as a pandemic But I think this word is somewhat appropriate because it reflects the extent to which humans Impact our entire world. It is a proposed name for an era of geological time The era in which we currently exist And it's a lens that Focuses on the impact that we have as humans So I think of I think of that relating to this idea of the beat whether that beat is climate change or COVID-19 It's it's a lens through which we can view everything And so I started covering climate change as my main beats in late 2018 early 2019 And what that looks like is making charts that look like this Both showing what we are What we are doing to the atmosphere I think it's important to look at charts like this and recognize that The Anthropocene does is an oversimplification. It's not all humans having an equal impact on the environment but Places like the United States And other developed countries have a hugely disproportionate impact on the climate and making charts that show the Show what the impact of that is this was a chart we did earlier this year Showing how the latest data from 2019 shows the past five years for the hottest on record So I've been a data journalist longer than I've been covering climate. I started at the Washington Post in 2015 I joined the Washington Post out of After graduating with a computer science degree Fortunately CC did a great job explaining what data journalism is so I don't have to spend too much of my time In this talk talking about that But I'm a member of the Washington Post graphics team And we do a lot of data and visual journalism Not just about climate change And So my work has been very much part of this this team So a little bit about what I do. I think it's a little easier for me to describe What I do by talking about the tools that I use so I do a lot of programming That happens in the terminal happens in text editors For that's for front-end web development for developing interactive charts I do a lot of data analysis and visualization using our studio I do some cartography with QGIS and Designing putting the final polish on charts and maps using Adobe Illustrator So But what I'm here to talk to you about today is this Big series of climate change stories we have done over the past 12 months Which we call the two degrees Celsius series The idea came from our climate science reporter Chris Mooney who spends a lot of his time reading Scientific papers and he was seeing a lot of papers that were Talking about Places on earth or warming much faster than the global average and In particular talking about the weird things that were happening in these places Things that were not necessarily getting a lot of play in Media things that were not generally public knowledge Sorry It's okay. Yeah, we just lost your screen share, but we can still see you Let me get that back See you again. Sorry Okay So so Chris had an idea to do a series linking all of these hot spots to go so he started talking to a lot of climate scientists and trying to get a Comprehensive picture of where all these hot spots were taking place And the framing for this series two degrees Celsius comes from the language of the Paris climate agreement So it's so which states that the goal is to quote strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise this century well below Two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels Another UN climate report adds an important nuance to this which is that this two degrees Celsius is really a quote defense line Not necessarily the edge of a cliff where if we stay on one side of it, we're fine and if we go to the other side We're not we want to stay as far away from two degrees Celsius as possible, but it is Been adopted as a goal That global leaders have To for the for the climate in general So what do we mean by pre-industrial levels? Well, we're talking about what the climate was like before we started Before we started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases Before this idea of the Anthropocene Takes place so So as Chris was talking to these climate scientists I started Realizing that a lot of the data they were drawing on was publicly available So I started downloading these data sets and learning how to analyze them and my goal was to figure out Sort of better understand how we know what the temperature is around the globe today and In particular how we know what it was like in Quote-unquote pre-industrial times So One way to look at this is by looking at where our temperature data actually comes from and it is Comes from these temperature stations so Harry Stevens and I made this map of All the temperature station records we could find the most comprehensive data set I've seen comes from Berkeley Earth and It is a it is an aggregate of a lot of different historical climate data sets, but it and it forms basically the raw Data that goes into their climate Their their climate Their temperature data sets so the earliest record in this data set is from Berlin in 1701 We start seeing records from North American Boston 1743 and We see some ocean observations actually come from the icodes database But these were actually taken by Benjamin Franklin on his last transatlantic crossing He was trying to study the Gulf Stream And so over time we start seeing a lot more of these temperature stations pop up and by 1850 We start to have enough that we can create an accurate estimate of the global temperature and then over the next Century or so We see a ton more bill in still we should note that it is not at all even there's a lot of places that we could call Data deserts for this And another interesting thing that we learned is that A lot of this data is not digitized Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading told us that there are quote literally billions of observations which are still in paper format Various archives and libraries all over the world This is actually an effort that we all can get involved with it's volunteer there were various crowd Sourced efforts like old weather org where you can digitize these records yourself So how do we actually get to a comprehensive Look at the data well it comes in these grid formats so These temperature data sets split up the globe into these into these grids their latitude and longitude based The various climate data sets that we used So this is how the various climate data sets we use compare to Noah and NASA's data sets start in 1880 and To us we use a Berkeley Earth and count in ways starting 1850 they have a variety of resolutions but for the contiguous United States Noah also provides a Much higher resolution data sets five kilometer grid, but it starts in 1895 The data comes in a net CDF format stands for network common data format and this format is It's possible to work with it with open source Gdoll tools and QGIS, but it's a little unwieldy NASA actually has a tool called panoply that lets you open it So it makes a little bit easier a free tool that makes a little easier to open And so I want to go over briefly how we actually did the data analysis so one method we used was method of rolling averages these are We've rebaselined this data relative to 1880 to 1899 Period which we're using to represent the pre industrial period It's not necessarily before the industrial revolution, but it's before we sick made significant changes to the atmosphere and then we're looking at We're looking at this data in five year average chunks And We also looked at using a linear regression method. It's It's a little more simplistic in that We know that climate change is not a linear Phenomenon But we so we use this method actually in the United States The data analysis was done in our studio and I think I'm running out of time. So I won't go over my exact directory structure. We use a library called raster Which makes it pretty easy to work with net CDF files and do analysis on them and I used our markdown to create analysis reports that I was able to Give to the other journalists who were Writing the stories and that we shared with our sources to get Comment on our our analysis So here's what we found we found that about when we look at the average past five years Compared to 1880 to 1899 We found that approximately ten percent of the globe has warmed more than two degrees Celsius and Approximately 20% of the globe is warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius and I'm gonna briefly talk about some of the stories we found in the data and then I will take some questions So I think you had some time so it'd be nice to hear the stories for sure. Yeah So this was the first the first story we did looked at the United States and it looked at in particular some areas where Winters have warmed very quickly We had this interactive feature that lets you look up your county and The designer Madison Walls created this amazing tool that lets you convert temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius This is this is what the piece looked like in print So for the our first story about the world I made this animation over time Showing the map changing And so yeah, we saw a lot of common stories happening So Yeah What we found was that people are their lives are being upended all around the globe We're seeing off the coast of Uruguay and Angola fisheries changing clams dying In Qatar, they're starting to actually air-condition the outdoors to make it possible to go outside We're also seeing Similarly in Alaska that oil companies are refrigerating the ground to keep their infrastructure from sinking where also the permafrost is buckling underneath people's houses and displacing them and We even saw this In the in the Alps. This was a temperature station that we found in our global temperature station data set and it's So it's an Austria it has been in place Since the 1880s it's seen 2.1 degrees Celsius of warming and the The mountain top it's on is actually melting so they have to put these braces in place to keep it together So when I started this talk or when I proposed this talk, I Thought that we were going to have published our data already But this is something that COVID-19 got in the way of so that will be coming soon Sorry about that But Look for that in the near future How much time do I have We're officially a couple minutes over, but that's fine. We can just finish up if you have any other thoughts Yeah, so I just other than that I wanted to Think a couple People were definitely We definitely couldn't done this project without the public data that we used so all the data that was Available There were some really helpful code examples Peter Aldhaus from BuzzFeed will has a great Example using are in the raster package to look at NASA's temperature data. That was hugely helpful So Yeah Yeah, so there are several questions We can't take them over slack or we can maybe have one or two now it's up to you sure Okay one is Well, one quick one would be when you do make it public. Where would you make that then the data public? Is there a repository you use or do you use? So we we have we we make a lot of our data public on github So this is one project that I worked on their fatal shooting police shootings database And so it'll be in us. It'll be similar to this So This is what we do for a lot of our our projects Yeah, and Then another question was about the analysis. So you said you use are for analysis. Were there other languages that you use as well? the The data analysis self was pretty much done in in our the Some of the visualization was done with Javascript But actually working with the temperature data was all done in our Okay Well, I think we should probably Stop there. We have another session. That's I think already started on the other channel. So I Would just want to say Thank you very much We all appreciate the work you do I mean data journalism in general is hard and it's a kind of behind-the-scenes type thing and we appreciate you walking us through and Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you