Tagged: Russia
Annals of climate change: June, 2010
The deniers have some explaining to do:
The Weather Underground reports that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center rates last month as the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, while NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls it the third warmest (behind June 1998 and June 2009). Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January – June, as the warmest such period on record. Moneyquote:
A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010. At least two other Middle East nations came within a degree of their hottest temperatures ever in June.
To judge from the map, Greenland and the the midwestern US got zapped pretty good, too.
Hat tip: Gus Reed.
Prosper and live long
Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don’t completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life:
The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the few outliers (South Africa, Russia, to a lesser extent, the USA) are countries with wide income disparity. Download larger versions here [pdf or ppt].
Hat tip: Cliff Kuang at Fast Company.
Visual data: landmass and population by country
A mysteriously anonymous website, Herald Daily (or at least weekly), has published this intriguing graphic contrasting the population density and land mass of the Earth’s 19 most capacious nations. I’ve included only a stub of the original, very large graphic here. Click on the image to see the whole thing.
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com.
