In his State of the Union Address earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change the "greatest threat to future generations."
"2014 was the planet's warmest year on record," he said in his speech. "Now, one year doesn't make a trend, but this does: 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen within the first 15 years of this century."
The president highlighted the seriousness of man-made climate change by outlining the effects of such rises in temperature. Rising oceans, longer and hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods and massive disruptions to the delicate ecology of the planet — all threats that the Pentagon claims pose immediate risks to the nation's national security.
Still, it's hard to correct such a tremendous issue without increasing public awareness and identifying the key contributors to climate change. Luckily, some of Bentley University's best and brightest are working to do just that.
An Interactive App to explore the factors contributing to climate changes
Vadym Barda, Akshay Prakash and Ganesh Kumar Subramanian — students in the Bentley University's Masters in Business Analytics program — built an interactive app that allows a user to explore the contribution of every country towards climate change for a given year and also how they varied over the years for each country.
"The main idea was introduced by Dr. David Oury, who teaches the MA799 Data Science class — he suggested that we do the research using the World Development Indicators data provided by the World Bank," Barda said. "Since the data has both a time and geographical component, we decided to develop this visualization app using Shiny for R and Google Visualization." The app, that involves all the computations in the cloud including accessing the data using the respective APIs, has two broad components. The first one allows visualization of every country’s contribution, on the world map, based on several indicators (like CO2 emissions) for a desired year. The second component tab intends to explore the variations of these contributions with time and also compare them between desired countries.
"We wanted to create something that would help create awareness about which countries are really contributing to climate change," said Prakash. “We also wanted to be able to explore their temporal variations that would essentially indicate whether adequate steps are being undertaken by individual governments to bring those contributions down.”
While few members of the younger generation are fully aware of the enormous man-made contributions to climate change, Barda, Prakash and Subramanian's app represents just one way individuals can educate themselves with ease and convenience. However, simply saying this doesn't quite do the tool justice.
You can tinker with the students' app here.
How it Works
The first tab of the app provides a color-coded graphic of the world's countries on a map, based on the value of the chosen indicator from the drop down menu on the left. You can choose to identify what countries produce the most carbon dioxide per capita, methane, hydrofluorocarbon, or even highlight which countries have threatened animal species or produce the most climate-harming emissions specific to an industry.
From there, you select a year to gather data from. An adjustable timeline spans from 1960 to 2014. As mentioned earlier, the data gathering happens in the cloud directly from the World Bank website using their API. So are the other computations – which makes the app more computationally efficient.
From there, you can increase or decrease the number of categories (2-9) used, reflected as the number of shades of the blue color on the map. The higher the number of categories you choose, the finer the classification of the countries (more number of segments) in terms of the values of the indicator chosen. The more categories used, the more colors will show up on the world chart, which segments the countries into different levels of climate change contribution.
Finally, if you're interested in one particular region of the world, the Americas for instance, you can choose to gather just that information.
The students have added another tab to the app that explores the changes of the indicators with time. It also allows a user to study the impact of one or two indicators on another.
"We have improved it by using a motion chart which specifically directs users to a chart that shows the trend and growth and decline of the climate change factors over the years," Prakash said.
We have used the Google Motion Charts that helps present the data using bubble charts and as time series plots, that provides the capability to study the compare the contributions between specific countries over time and also explore the levels of correlations, if any, between different pairs of indicators. This way, we believe one can also quantify the effectiveness of awareness campaigns or other measures that an individual country may have undertaken to bring down the contributions of man-made factors on global climate change.
One can press the play button to see the correlations between two indicators chosen from the drop down box on the left. Time is a variable on the X-axis, which when chosen, provides the temporal variation of the indicator on the Y-axis. The effect of another indicator can also be studied on the temporal variation of the Y-axis indicator by selecting this indicator to be variable that defines the size of the bubbles.
How Bentley is Helping Create the Next Generation of Thought Leaders
It was all part of a class assignment to create a Shiny app about a subject the students found interesting. This time, climate change was the hot topic, but the skills Prakash, Barda and Subramanian developed here can be applied to thousands of different contexts with the right data.
"This program is truly amazing, and every day when I come to Bentley, I know that I am in the right place," Barda said. "I think the most important thing that I've learned so far here is that you can never learn enough, especially in analytics and data science, and you should continuously grow and discover new things to keep up and stay afloat!"
"Now that I have finished core courses, I can say that Bentley gave me an outstanding set of skills and techniques, which are highly valued by employers."
After officially developing an app, Barda is looking forward to a career in management consulting. Although, his first concern is finding a work opportunity that offers a constant challenge.
"I know for sure that I want a job where my brain would constantly work and evolve," Barda said. "That's the only kind of job that can make me happy."