Global CO₂ Emissions Analysis

A data-driven investigation into historical responsibility, decoupling, and global carbon footprints

Welcome

Welcome to this comprehensive analysis of global CO₂ and greenhouse gas emissions. This project was developed as an exploratory data analysis assignment aimed at answering complex questions about our changing climate through the lens of data.

Project Context

The goal of this investigation is to start from a raw dataset and present structured, data-backed arguments that draw meaningful conclusions about global carbon emissions. Rather than just plotting lines on a graph, this project tests specific hypotheses related to economic growth, international trade, fuel systems, and climate justice.

This analysis is built upon the Our World in Data (OWID) CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions dataset, a highly granular database containing national and global records spanning centuries.

How to Navigate This Site

The site is structured to guide readers logically from fundamental economic relationships to complex policy implications:

  • Data Summary: Start here for an overview of the OWID dataset, its structural characteristics, and the foundational data used across the project.
  • A. Fundamentals: Establishing the relationship between population, GDP, and emissions, identifying the largest historical and present emitters.
  • B. Trade & Intensity: Examining whether emissions are truly falling in developed nations, or merely being exported via global supply chains (carbon footprint vs. domestic production).
  • C. Fuel & Energy: Breaking down emissions by source (coal, oil, gas, land-use change) to understand structural dependencies.
  • D. Climate Justice: A deep look into the disparity between historical cumulative responsibility and modern per-capita emissions.
  • E. Decoupling & GHG: Investigating modern decoupling of GDP from emissions and broadening the scope to non-CO₂ greenhouse gases (like methane).
  • Code & Methodology: A collection of the code snippets, data cleaning methods, and plotting functions used to generate the charts.
  • Conclusion: The final synthesis of all insights, summarizing the complete narrative.

Please use the sidebar on the left to explore the analysis chapters.

Hypotheses at a Glance

Chapter Core Claim Formal Test Result
A. Fundamentals Wealth drives per-capita emissions H5: Mann-Whitney U p=1.1e-14 ✅
B. Trade & Intensity West exports its carbon H1: Paired t-test p=7.8e-04 ✅
C. Fuel & Energy Coal grids have worse intensity H3: Mann-Whitney U p=8.1e-06 ✅
D. Climate Justice History determines responsibility H4: Spearman ρ=0.853 p=6.2e-62 ✅
E. Decoupling G7 economies have decoupled H2: Wilcoxon signed-rank p=7.1e-22 ✅

Each visual argument in this analysis is backed by a formal statistical test in Chapter F.