Chapter 1 Introduction

As the human population grows ever larger, climate change continually becomes a more pressing issue. Today, more people than ever are backing and contributing to the movement for a greener planet, and a huge factor for this movement’s growth is the increase in awareness for climate change. Even compared to a few years ago, there are more news articles available to help start conversations about climate change. As more media outlets begin talking about the green movement, more and more people are becoming educated and motivated to help make a change.

Interestingly, a lot of the existing data and science about climate change have always been around. However, these findings were not always easily accessible to the general population without the help of media. Producing scientific research is not enough to get people talking about climate change; people have to be emotionally moved.

Our team was inspired by Bloomberg Businessweek’s visualization: “What’s Really Warming the World?”. From a technical standpoint, the visualization is just a basic line plot on very standard data. However, the way that the underlying message is framed and presented produces a very impactful and accessible visualization. The animation and supporting text help display a very logical progression of thoughts to viewers, delivering a message to viewers at a more emotional level. This visualization motivated our team to take advantage of the vast available data on climate change to produce a tool that presents our findings from a human-centered standpoint in hopes of inspiring others to join the push for a greener world.

Our team chose to focus on renewable energy. In this study, we examined the usage of renewable energy sources at the country level over time and studied relationships between renewables usage, emissions, and financial states. Through our findings and visualizations, we hope to generate an optimistic sentiment by presenting the positive effects of switching to renewables and encourage people to continue fighting towards a renewable future.