Mapping Climate Change

An essential part of any geography topic is the creation, utilization, and analysis of maps on the particular subject.  Maps help give data a spatial aspect and make the information more accessible and relevant.  Maps are the purview of geography and an educated geographer and an informed citizen should both have access to this indispensable way of demonstrating data.

This website from the World Bank has lots of data-driven maps on many different topics. Particularly, you can explore different indications for climate change such as carbon emissions and population growth.

This map resizes the countries of the world to indicate their carbon dioxide emissions rather than their actual true areas.  This type of map is called a cartogram.

Source: viewsoftheworld.net

While it effectively illustrates the difference in carbon emissions per country, this map, however, bothers me as an American.  In order to display the data more truthfully and fairly the size of the countries should be based on carbon emissions per capita.  Of course the China, the United States, and India look swollen and oversized, that would be expected on a map purely based on population since they are the largest countries in the world, as the following map based only on population demonstrates.

Source: worldmapper.org

Climate change data can be explored and mapped in many different ways.  There are maps focused on resource use, energy sources, climate change impacts, future weather projections, ecological impacts, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The website Worldmapper.org has cartograms focusing on different categories like fuel sources, forest loss, and greenhouse gas emissions among many, many others.

This website, ShowWorld, also has many different cartograms based on lots of different data sets.  These cartograms are non-contiguous, meaning the countries are resized but aren't still connected to each other, so their relative shapes are retained, as opposed to the cartograms above and at worldmapper.org which are contiguous and therefore their shapes are often greatly distorted.

This website, by the Center for Global Development, has a set of maps describing the impact of climate change on the different countries of the world.

This website, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, displays a map with interactive information about the specific types of impacts of climate change on specific locations, such as sea level rise and impacts of seaside cities. This map, by National Geographic, is very similar.

This website, by the Nature Conservancy, show past and projected surface temperatures and precipitation.

Student activity - research and find a map demonstrating some aspect of Climate Change and write an explanation as to why you think having the data displayed on a map helps you understand the concept better than if you had seen it in a graph or paragraph.