Peer response
1. Article: (Links to an external site.)
The article I chose is about the current state of the pandemic. When we take a look we’ll see a rough estimate of how many people have been affected by the virus. The article combines multiple data sources to get a sense of true cases all over the US. In addition to this, the article suggests strong assumptions for implications on herd immunity. One of their assumptions is that recovered individuals are immune to the virus and i.e reinfection would not occur. Moreover, data on reported cases varied from state to state and the article does a decent job of providing those numbers on a chart.
What I like about this article is the overall informative explanation on reported cases using graphs. For example, in figure 4, the data shown there represents letters A-D, where A shows credible intervals for the predictive distributions of new infections and you can clearly see the curve is positively skewed. If you begin to look at the chart next to it and so on and so forth, it is quite easy to determine the differences in messages from cumulative immunity to newly vaccinated people each day.
2. Denning, S. (2021, July 23). Extreme heat waves in a warming world don’t just break records – they shatter them. The Conversation. (Links to an external site.)
The article I read for this week talks about the earth alarmingly warming up beyond records and the resulting catastrophic consequences from it. NASA mapped out the bell curve of the earth’s average land temperatures since 1950, and they found that this bell curve over the past couple of decades has been drastically shifting to the right. Because of this shift, we are frequently experiencing more extreme temperatures that would have been rare decades ago. With these more frequent extreme temperatures, we are experiencing devastating effects such as longer durations of heat wave seasons, more droughts and wildfires, and more active hurricane seasons. The author emphasizes that this heat will only get worse the more society relies on burning coal, oil, and gas, and that there is only so much that communities can do to prepare for natural disasters that top previous ones.
What I like most about this article is that it provides a video that shows the shift in the bell curve. I think it makes it easier to understand how these extreme temperatures are occurring more often, even for somebody who has not taken a statistics course. I also appreciate how the author highlights how the more extreme heat impacts the origination of the different natural disasters we are prone to, although some of these disasters still have some areas that need further research regarding their relation/nonrelation to global warming.
