Data and carbon dioxide

How does Canada's CO₂ emissions compare to other G7 countries?

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas. This means it's a "gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps heat.” Think about greenhouse gases as tents. If you're camping, the tent covers you and keeps in warm air. 

So where does CO₂ come from? Commonly, it comes from burning fossil fuels (fuels made from decomposed organisms) such as coal or oil. For example, when you drive a car with a combustion engine, it burns gasoline. When the gasoline is burned, it releases CO_2. 

We used data science to learn how Canada's CO₂ emissions compared to other G7 countries. The G7 is a group of seven nations that meet to discuss international and local issues.

To answer our question, we:

• Gathered data from World Bank Open Data about CO₂ emissions in G7 nations. “Per capita” means emissions for each person in each  nation. 
• Created a line graph to compare each nation's CO₂ emissions. We call this line graph a data visualization.

Reflect on what you see

Look and interact with the data visualization above. When you mouse-over the line graph, you’ll notice more information appears.

Think about the following questions:

• What do you notice about the line graph?
• What do you wonder about the data?

Use the fill-in-the-blank prompts to summarize your thoughts:

• “I used to think_______”
• “Now I think_______”
• “I wish I knew more about_______”
• “This data visualization reminds me of_______”

Learn how we visualized the data

Go to our walk-through (in Jupyter notebook format) to see how we used the data science process (formulating a question, gathering the data, analyzing the data with code, and creating the visualizations) to create the line graph.