About the Book

Overview

Welcome to our book on Climate Change. This book aims to not only give the readers hands-on coding experience with Python but more importantly understand the climate change unfolding around us.

We believe (based on the evidence that we have seen and analyzed in the book) and as highlighted by NASA report on climate change that

  • Global Temperature Is Rising
  • The Ocean Is Getting Warmer
  • The Ice Sheets Are Shrinking
  • Glaciers Are Retreating
  • Snow Cover Is Decreasing
  • Snow Cover Is Decreasing’
  • Arctic Sea Ice Is Declining
  • Extreme Events Are Increasing in Frequency
  • Ocean Acidification Is Increasing

Topics Explored

The topics we explore in the book attempt to give the readers generate and understand ongoing climate change. Some topics are:

  • Climate and Weather
  • Temperature
  • Seasonal Temperatures
  • High and Low Temperatures
  • Snow and Ice
  • Oceans and Marine Heat Waves
  • Sea Level Rise

The general approach that we take in the book is illustrated below:

---
title: Work Flow to Build A Climate Dashboard 2024
---
%%| mermaid-format: png

flowchart TB
    A["Climate Change Concepts"] --> B["Get Data"]  --> C["Clean Data"] --> D["Transform Data"] --> E["Visualize Data"] --> F["Climate Insights"]

The goal is to build a cliamate dashboard using data from EPA and other authoritative sources.

---
title: Climate Dashboard 2024
---
flowchart TB
    A[Temperature] --> X[Climate Dashboard 2024] 
    B["Snow and Ice"] --> X
    C[Oceans] --> X
    D["Sea Level Rise"] --> X
    E[Others] --> X

What the book is and is not

This book is not just about Python programming. There are much more comprehensive and much better written books that teach programming better. The book instead aims to combine Climate Change data, Programming, and Visualization as a means to generate insights and better understand how climate is changing and how humans are impacting climate.

Who Should Read This

This book is targeted towards middle school and high school students who are just learning programming. We have included a Python primer so that students can learn the basics before jumping into the rest of the chapters.

We hope the book can generate more awareness about the reality of climate change and what is driving climate change. Seeing is believing! We believe raising awareness about climate change is the first step to catalyze meaningful action to mitigate the effects of climate change. We ourselves read about climate change but became much more aware of the severity of the climate change in the process of writing this book. Seeing the data and graphs ourselves made us appreciate how much climate change can impact life as we know it. In short, if we don’t want to race towards an apocalyptic future, we need to act NOW!!!

Use of ChatGPT and Other Large Language Models (LLMs)

When we started our programming and learning journey in 2019, ChatGPT wasn’t available. When we were finalizing the chapters in 2023 and 2024, ChatGPT became widely available. Initially, we were hesitant in using ChatGPT. But we realized, especially towards the end of our journey that ChatGPT is extremely useful for generating the documentation for the code we have written. We rewrote some explanations for our code using GitHub Copilot. We left our original explanations in some places, and you can see the difference! Alas, GitHub Copilot gave more detailed and better explanations than what we were giving!