Data for Durban

There is a climate conference on in Durban, South Africa. This event has been difficult to miss because it has been accompanied by the usual distractions: First, we had another release of stolen personal correspondence among climate scientists (the two-year old rejects from the “climategate” non-scandal), presumably in the hope that this would torpedo the climate negotiations. No one has shown much interest in this very transparent attempt to malign scientists.

Then parts of the media went into overdrive to misrepresent climate science and attack real journalists whose reporting is based on the scientific literature rather than ideology. Those frenetic attempts at distraction are likely to continue for as long as the negotiations in Durban, only to disappear from the public arena shortly thereafter. (Until the next UN climate meeting, that is, although by then the stolen emails will be very stale indeed although the media will surely find new things to invent or distort.)

But for now, because it may be difficult to find any reliable information about Durban and the relevant data in segments of the Australian media, it is useful to draw attention to our collection of links to data, which may help overcome this deficit. For example, those data tell us about our historical responsibility and the data tell us how badly polluting Australia is compared to all but a handful of other countries in the world.

The list of links below is a rich resource for anyone interested in economic and environmental data (though not climate data—they can be found here or here). Those links are always just a click away under the “Links to data” button at the top of this site:

World Economic Data

Trading Economics. A privately owned resource dedicated to providing economic and trade data.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

UN Greenhouse data. Downloadable spreadsheets for worldwide emissions.
IEA Greenhouse data. Another lengthy source (in PDF) about worldwide emissions.
U.S. Greenhouse inventory. Detailed source about U.S. emissions by the EPA.
U.S. Energy Information Administration. Very nicely laid out source of emissions data.
Global carbon flow. Trade separates consumption from production: Where are the goods consumed that were produced with emissions elsewhere?
CDIAC. The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) is the primary climate-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Data on CO2 “export” via the supply chain from Stanford University.

World Bank, Human Development and Climate Change

Worldbank open data. A compendium of global data on everything ranging from human development to health and economic activity.
Human development reports. Accessible via Google Public Data Explorer and also as e-book
World Bank on Climate Change. This portal is a central hub of information, data and reports about climate change around the world.

OECD

The OECD provides statistics on pretty much everything. An amazing resource.

Green Facts

Greenfacts.org. Provides a compendium of literature and data relevant to environmental and energy issues.

Disasters

Annual disaster data base. Published by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. which is located within the School of Public Health of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Brussels.

Renewable Energy Investment

The Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative, which is supported by the UNEP and co-published with Bloomberg, provides data on global investment trends in renewable energy.