Welcome to The Crunch, hope you are all having a great start to the new year.
This week we’ve got data on water entitlements in Australia, a shift away from a “culture of progress” in Europe, booming rooftop solar in the Australian energy market, rain in the south-east, a dashboard on what is expensive and why you probably shouldn’t use a pie chart for your datavis.
Five charts from the fortnight
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1. A booming water trade
Bloomberg’s deep dive into Australia’s water market beautifully illustrates both the scale – enough every year to supply the population of France – as well as the many inequities and spillovers. Not least for small family farms, Indigenous communities and the environment. This map shows the concentration of cotton growers with flood plain licenses in the northern Murray-Darling basin. You can find more charts including the decline in water flow in the rivers here.
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2. The end of progress?
Language and culture play roles in economic development according to analysis from John Burns-Murdoch at the Financial Times. The use of words related to progress increased in the centuries before industrialisation in both Spain and England. But they have fallen away since the 1960s, while words related to threats and risk have become more common. Read more here.
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3. Booming rooftop solar
Almost one in three Australian homes have solar panels installed – some of the highest levels in the world. Rooftop solar now produces so much energy that the wholesale electricity market in some states briefly turns negative on sunny days. UNSW researcher Dr Dylan McConnell made this chart to show what happened to wholesale prices during the day in the last quarter of 2023.
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4. Why is everything so expensive?
This interactive dashboard from Paolo Corti, Federica Fragapane and a team from Google Trends shows the top Google searches for “why is/are X so expensive” for every country and year between 2012 and 2023. Explore more here.
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5. Torrential rain in Australia
Australia’s east has seen huge dumps of rain over the holiday period, flooding parts of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Journalist and economist Jason Murphy produced this chart of cumulative rainfall at Melbourne’s Olympic Park weather station just south of the CBD.
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Spotlight on … a record-setting year for heat
The BBC data team produced a series of great charts illustrating how anomalous 2023 was, how often, and where
Interactive explorer of global daily surface air temperatures on Climate Reanalyzer
Interactive explorer of global daily sea surface temperatures from Climate Reanalyzer
Interactive chart of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center
Off the Charts
Pie charts have long fallen out of favour in the datavis community but it’s still an option in many chart tools. Prof Adrian Barnett and Dr Victor Oguoma have a brilliant explainer in The Conversation on how and why pie charts can be hard to read, sometimes misrepresent the underlying data and why a bar chart is often a better option.
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