Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter, we have charts on the best supermarket coffee, how adequate the new emissions targets are in Australia, why it’s so hard to find women’s clothes that fit, the age distribution of chess grandmasters, and how pensioners’ incomes have soared in France and the UK.
But first … some horrifying climate-related maps
The last two weeks have featured an avalanche of global heating-related news in Australia. The government published its long-awaited climate risk report, which details all the many ways that life will become terrible as the world heats up.
We’ve animated three maps based on data published alongside the risk report here.
The maps show just how bad things will get for heatwaves, drought and coastal flooding if urgent action to address global heating is not taken. Unfortunately, we can’t run animated gifs in this email, so you’ll just have to look at each of these maps and mentally transition from one to the other:
In the same week, researchers at RMIT published the Heat Vulnerability Index, which combines temperature readings with data on populations particularly susceptible to heat (such as older Australians and those with disabilities), the built environment and green space, and socioeconomic factors like income and education.
Josh mapped the data for most major Australian cities here.
Also in the same week, researchers from Monash University presented new estimates of heatwave-related deaths in Australia, which showed lower socioeconomic areas have higher rates of heatwave deaths. More charts and maps on that here.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. Why is it so hard to find clothes that fit?
This is a brilliant interactive feature from the team at the Straits Times, which answers a common complaint for women: why does shopping for clothes feel like a guessing game?
They chart how sizing varies wildly from brand to brand; someone could be a medium at one outlet, a large at another and an extra large somewhere else:
There’s a lot more in the feature, including some very neat 3D graphics – you can check it out here.
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2. Yet more climate charts
Following the climate risk report, the Australian government released its new 2035 emissions reduction target.
We thought the ABC’s Alex Lim and Jo Lauder did a great job using charts to put the new targets into context with past emissions, the trajectory that official government projections put us on, and how much further we’d have to go to try to limit warming to below 1.5C:
It’s definitely worth checking out some of the other charts in the piece, like the one that compares emissions with and without land-use changes.
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3. Have you missed your chance to become a chess grandmaster?
As part of this week’s #TidyTuesday, data visualisation specialist Nicola Rennie produced this lovely plot of chess rankings by age and gender:
Looking at the data, it seems like the median is around the late 30s, and it looks like there are fewer older people holding grandmaster titles than in lower tiers.
There’s also a great plot from last week, positioning the cuisines of different countries on a scale from chicken to egg, and butter to oil.
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4. Pensioners in France earn more than working-age people
This column from perennial Crunch feature-ee John “Linechart” Burn-Murdoch outlines one consequence of an ageing population and the political dominance of baby boomers – the ballooning cost of pensions.
This chart in particular caught our eye – not only due to the headline figure of French pensioners now having higher incomes than working-age people, but also because of how low Australia is in comparison to other OECD countries:
The column makes the argument that unless something changes, pensions will continue to grow in the UK and France at a rate higher than the income of working-age people. However, it seems that there is little political appetite for change.
Bookmarks
Social media ban trial data reveals racial bias in age checking software: just how inaccurate is it?
Off the Charts
Nicholas Jordan, one of our food writers, embarked on an epic (and possibly life-threatening) journey to review 41 different ground coffee products offered in supermarkets.
The final scores combined the reviews from five judges covering bitterness, acidity, sweetness and intensity, with overall scores for the coffee with and without milk.
So we charted the results on a scatter plot “explorer”, where you can compare all the variables. Whether you prefer your coffee expensive and bitter or cheap and sweet, we’ve got you covered:
Read more here.
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