Information Is Beautiful

Very interesting + clean visualisation. Wouldn’t have thought England was so on target (depends on the targets, I guess). How comes the Big Boys are left off? (ie US, China, Russia, India)

Great graph! Takes one or two reads but then it shows a lot. I am a bit confused however – what does the size of the bubbles mean? E.g Italy – very tiny whilst Scotland is huge?

Great blog, but this visualisation is appalling. The fact that you need to re-explain it in the comments says it all. Honestly, a stacked bar with a midpoint at the country target, then countries’ performance on a vertical axis, with a colour adjustment for ‘extras’ would have been an awful lot easier to interpret. This is about making data accessible, after all.

Yeah, it’s a great idea, but very confusing. I would recommend just having a black circle as the target and filling it up from the inside with green (cos green is nice) to the degree that it’s been met. You could have a different shade of green for the “extras”.

Would also be nice to see countries who are not Kyoto signatories somewhere on there, that could be hard. Maybe a single big target representing the whole world signing Kyoto, and this has been “met” to the degree that countries has signed up – but weighted by each countries emissions…

David, thanks for commenting so quickly.

Amount you have to ‘explain’ a visualisation is a tricky one. I quite like having figures on bar charts, for instance, but know it goes against Tufte’s ‘data-ink’ ideas. Also, just because something is not *immediately* comprehensible doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad viz when trying to convey complex stuff (although suppose audience matters for this too e.g. academic vs. newspaper). For this one, an example country might have helped with annotations to explain.

Agree with Lluis C. that the bar chart is fairly easy to interpret. However it looks horrible, so worth a stab at something else. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes.

Keep it up please, love the site!

Why is UK shown as England and Scotland – what about Wales and Northern Ireland?

Scotland’s emissions fell 13.4% over the period from 1990 – 2006 (last year data is available).

The UK’s Kyoto target is a 12.5% cut over the period 1990 – (average of 2008-12).

Therefore if Scotland had a Kyoto target (it doesn’t because it’s not a nation state – only the UK has a Kyoto target) it would have already met it.

http://bit.ly/rRSQe

But of course this argument is pretty much irrelevant because we know the emissions cuts agreed in Kyoto were nowhere near enough to ensure global warming doesn’t rise above 2 degrees C. In fact the Scottish Parliament has just set in law a reduction in emissions of 42% by 2020 (on 1990 baseline), which is about what the IPCC says is necessary for developed nations:

http://bit.ly/a1KAV

Hard to grasp at first, but it seems so intuitive once you explained it in the comments. (Guess that’s not a success, though.)

@Jacob The US didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol, meaning we, unfortunately, never said that we would commit to this. At least now we have a bill to force car makers to increase fuel efficiency, but we’re definitely not doing our part!

The USA actually never signed, better said ratified, the Kyoto Protocol. So there is no target to accomplish, this would probably explain the lack of data.
China sort of thinks its unfair to compare them to other countries as they make up a huge amount of the world population.

Hi David
This is the first time I’ve seen your blog, but interested by efforts to think differently about quickly/effectively communicating info on climate change.

Alas, I have to agree with many of the above comments, including your own that this isn’t quite there yet, but I think a simple refinement could go a long way. Why not start every country with a large circle to represent their target. I would go for red, as it’s has strong visual associations with danger/bad as well as a bullseye. Then fill in as much %-wise of the circle in yellow or green as they have come towards meeting the target (fill in so that there is a yellow/green circle in the middle of the red circle; so countries who had met 100% of their target would have entirely covered over the red target entirely, and for countries who are only meeting 50% of their target, the radius of the yellow/green circle would be half the radius of the red circle). Similar to the suggestion above, you could use a second shade of green to show ‘extras’. For countries that have met 0% of the target and are instead still increasing from 1990 levels, you could use a dashed red line set out a distance beyond the red target circle to show how much they are actually extending the amount of additional yellow/green reducing they will need to do to meet the target now.

That all sounds a bit mucky in writing, but I’m not sure how to add visuals into the comments. Also, would highly recommended an examples based key per suggestion above where you point out the significance of each layer of the circle – would need to have at least two examples though; one for a country that was partially meeting its target, and one for a country that was failing plus increasing its emissions. A third to show a country meeting through a mix of in-country reductions and ‘extras’ would also be helpful.

The reason, that almost all CEE (Central-East European) countries are on target: after 1990 socialism ended, and much of the heavy industries were shut down in the following decade due to economic and efficiency reasons, and never opened again. ‘It’s only “luck” that this region meets the target.

There are many countries left here even mine also………The population of china is too large so u have to add it. It make a major difference in any subject.

Errata : last paragraph of rpreceding post should read :
“Off hand, I would suggest using larger empty circles with black perimetres to represent target values, and an INNER colored circle to represent the projection of the % attained, while the color would indicate % of dependacy on “extras” (carbon trading).
Nonetheless, the idea is interesting.”

Hi

Thanks for informationisbeautiful.net, I adore your site!
However, I can’t efficiently get any information out of this post. (Don’t get me wrong:I really
_love_ this site, it’s a genious idea)
I read “Information Dashboard Design” by Stephen Few, which I think is quite good, and at the bottom of page 60 he writes about using circles to visualize information. He suggests not to use circles like that because it makes it nearly impossible to read information out of them.
Sorry for criticising your work & looking forward to your next post!

Correcting some misinformation about the US: The US is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, but neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush nor Barack Obama ever submitted it to the US Senate for final ratification. Shortly before becoming a signatory to the agreement, the US Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which more or less declared the Kyoto Protocol to be dead on arrival unless it was significantly modified. Since 41 Democratic Senators voted for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (with four abstaining), blaming the failure of the US to ratify the treaty on George W. Bush seems pretty simplistic.

…and yeah, the graphics, while creative, are a little confusing.

Hi David,

Interesting visualisation, thanks.

LowCarbonEconomy.com are about to launch an exciting new climate change data project.

1. We found a good source for the data I think you were after for this: http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/dataservice/metadetails.asp?id=1080 (if that’s helpful at all)

2. Would be really interested to talk to you about making the data we’ve collected beautiful too. Please do contact me if you’re interested.

Cheers,

David

All countries that are “on target” are Easter European countries that de-industrialized after the fall of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Thats a measure of success, all right – go back to the caves and export your population for menial jobs in the West.

Canadas fail is caused by the oil sands out CO2 output will increase at a decreasing rate till 2020 then start dropping off, we are doing our part to reduce CO2 in the rest of the country though