Ebola and Other Diseases: The role of Climate Change and Deforestation

Source

This week the World Health Organisation described the current Ebola outbreak as ‘the most severe acute health emergency in modern times’, with the epidemic now killing more people than all previous Ebola outbreaks combined.

Whilst epidemics on this scale are thankfully rare, there are increasing fears that our burgeoning population, warming climate and rapid urbanisation of previously forested land has already increased the pace in which deadly diseases can infect and spread amongst humans. As deforestation and climate change look set to get worse before they get better, are we facing a future of greater risk from global disease?

Earth's Weather and Climate: Online Tools to Explore the Data

Data has become so commonplace in our day-to-day life that we seldom appreciate just how much information we collect on a daily basis. The challenge is not in compiling the data, however, but in how best to portray it in a way that allows us to distinguish between meaningful trends and insignificant noise. With the advent of the internet, scores of websites have come online that deals with this problem in new and inventive ways, using data previously inaccessible to the general public. Whereas before we could only visualise datasets through graphs or pictures, we can now interact with datasets, painting a much more thorough and informative picture.

However, another problem is knowing how to find these websites. This post will overview just some of the free and readily available tools that can be used to visualise climate change and weather statistics in an elegant and engaging way.