Since time immemorial, our lives have been at the hands of nature. Since time immemorial, we have been trying to harness it. But one thing has always been proven true: we CANNOT control nature. We can SORT OF harness it by diverting its power to our use, but it is still up to nature if it wants to source us.
Every year, numerous news hubs report the same thing: natural calamities are becoming more frequent and more powerful. This has been the song they have been singing since I could string words together and form sentences to come up with meaning for the first time. Lo and behold, they were right then, and they are still correct now.
With this knowledge in mind, I wanted to see something from one of the contributors of this phenomenon: our carbon dioxide (CO2) emission.
I download our CO2 emission (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-dataset-sources) and lists of natural disasters (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disastersfrom) Our World in Data.
I used Tableau to start my analysis.
QUESTIONS: Primary: Does the country spewing more CO2 than the rest of the world gets more affected by these abnormal calamities?
- Which countries are expunging a lot of CO2 into our atmosphere?
- Which countries are suffering from natural disasters due to these abnormalities?
HYPOTHESIS: Primary: I don’t think so since I believe these are the developed countries which would have avenues to protect themselves.
- China, India, United States of America
- Japan, Philippines, Tuvalu
DATA ANALYSIS
Before we answer the primary question, we must address the elephant in the room. I will use Population Connection’s article (https://populationconnection.org/resources/population-and-climate/) to answer it. According to the article, “Every additional person increases carbon emissions.” I know that this is not the heart of the analysis but is it a tool for us to look at the many avenues carbon emissions play in our daily lives. However, this answers the first query : “Which countries are expunging a lot of CO2 into our atmosphere?”
The table below (the list of country is long, so I had to crop the rest out) shows the relationship between a country’s population and its CO2 emission. The left side corresponds to the population and the right the CO2 emissions.
If we look at the population side (exclude: Continents and World), the most populous country is China and then India and then the United States. But if we look at the CO2 emissions side, the number one source of CO2 is the US and then China and then Russia. We could we here although Russia is not in the top three most populous countries in the world, it still ranks third on the top CO2 emitters.
The graph below shows the countries who are being affected by natural disasters—with the most populous countries and top CO2 emitters not even on the top 5 list which includes:
- Mauritania,
- Tonga,
- Tuvalu,
- Bangladesh, and
- Djibouti.
From the two graphs alone, we can concur and answer the primary question: “Does the country spewing more CO2 gets more and more abnormal calamities?” And the answer is No. This is a case of environmental injustice as to how the ones allegedly causing these disasters are the ones not being affected by them.