Comments on: Polar bears and climate change vs coal and GDP? https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/21/polar-bears-and-climate-change-vs-coal-and-gdp/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:18:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Ethan Zuckerman https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/21/polar-bears-and-climate-change-vs-coal-and-gdp/#comment-308 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:57:27 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=470#comment-308 I thought this was a great example of both the challenges and benefits of telling stories with data. I think your intuitions in connecting climate change concern to coal is a really interesting one… and that your polar bear mentions is a great data set that demands analysis. I’m not convinced of the connections you reference in either… and you’re very careful to make clear that you may or may not be either.

On the coal data – we should sit down and try a scatter plot to try to correlate the two sets. I am unconvinced there’s a relationship between the two, but would love to show you a few more tools you might use to explore the space. Also, I think Eugene’s proposed tool for correlating a set with lots of different single variables is an idea the two of you might benefit from discussing together.

]]>