It’s Getting Hot in Here

Analysis of Global CO2 Emissions Over Time

Impressive Squirtle
Cassidy Cheesman, Joanne Wang, Ming DeMers, Elisabeth Pan, and Ivan Lin

5/5/23

Topic and Motivation

  • Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our generation, with increased global CO2 emissions being one of the leading contributors to this issue.

  • In order to combat the effects of climate change, we must first understand the data behind it.

  • Research questions:

    • What is the relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions for developing versus developed countries in 2018?

    • Is the true proportion of countries with a CO2 emission greater than the US in the twentieth century different from those in the twenty-first century?

The Data

  • Created to show how emissions are changing in each country

  • The Our World in Data team created the original dataset on behalf of the Our World in Data project

  • The instances that comprise the dataset represent countries (per year from 1992 to 2018) with 2484 instances total.

  • The observations (rows) are countries per year and the attributes (columns) are various emission data for each country per year

  • The current dataset we will use is a subset of the original dataset, with all the tonnes units converted into kilotons and the variable names altered

Highlights from the EDA

Inference, Modeling, and Analysis

Research question: What is the association between GDP and CO2 emissions for developing versus developed countries in 2018?

# A tibble: 2 × 5
  term                             estimate std.error statistic p.value
  <chr>                               <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>   <dbl>
1 (Intercept)                    -0.514      0.226       -2.27   0.0230
2 Emissions.Production.CO2.Total -0.0000569  0.000192    -0.296  0.767

\[ log(\frac{p}{1-p})=-5.14 \times 10^{-1} +(- 5.69 \times 10^{-5} \times total~CO2~emissions) \] The intercept can be interpreted as the log odds of a country being “developed” if total CO2 emissions is 0, which is \(-5.14 \times 10^{-1}\). However, because we do not use or think in terms of log odds, we can further interpret this intercept by evaluating p. The odds, \(\frac {p}{1-p}\), of a country being “developed” if total CO2 emissions is 0 is \(e ^ {-5.14 \times 10 ^ {-1}}\) which is 0.598, where p represents the probability that the country is developed. Thus, given that total CO2 emissions is 0, the probability a country is developed is \(e ^ {-5.14 \times 10 ^ {-1}} - e ^ {-5.14 \times 10 ^{-1}} p\) or 0.37.

Conclusions and Future Work

  • We find that there is indeed an increase in CO2 emissions between the two centuries

  • For developing countries, a near-exponential increase

  • For developed countries, a linear increase.

  • This requires transitioning to renewable energy sources, improving energy efficiency, reducing deforestation, and promoting reforestation and eco-repair.

  • Not all 195 countries, nor only 1992 - 2018.

  • In the future, we hope to explore a larger time frame, and examine more features than just GDP, such as population, industrialization, number of cities, etc.

  • Developing or developed, every nation has a duty to help protect and preserve the planet in which we all reside.