Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter, we have charts on how global heating is supercharging hurricanes, how politicians are campaigning on youth crime in Queensland despite data showing youth crime is historically low, the toll that fentanyl overdoses are taking on American lives and what happens when you combine a map of Australia with a map of the US.
But first … life in Gaza amid the incessant sounds of war
There’s not a lot of data visualisation in this multimedia feature, but it’s a very worthwhile immersive look into the daily sounds of life in Gaza.
The soundscapes shift from day to night, with the whirring of drones, Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people giving way to something more normal as people go outside to find the missing, dig out the dead and look at the damage.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. How fentanyl drove a tsunami of death in America
This striking chart shows the rise of overdose deaths from fentanyl in different regions of the United States, here showing overdose deaths in the north-east:
It’s part of a larger analysis of trends in overdose deaths, which also uses a time series of maps to show how increasing overdose deaths were correlated with increasing fentanyl seizures from law enforcement agencies.
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2. The decline in the youth crime rate doesn’t stop politicians from campaigning on youth crime
Kenji Sato from the ABC produced this article which neatly shows that, despite the political rhetoric in the Queensland election campaign about youth crime, the data shows that crime rates are low in historical terms:
This is a phenomenon we have also covered at Guardian Australia, albeit with fewer charts. One criminologist interviewed by the ABC said there was “absolutely unanimous” academic consensus that claims about increasing youth crime rates were false, saying: “There’s no data to suggest that the rates of youth crime are spiralling out of control in Queensland or indeed anywhere in Australia.”
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3. How Uber and Lyft manipulate minimum pay laws in New York City by preventing drivers from working
This excellent investigation from Bloomberg News used a WhatsApp bot to crowdsource reports from rideshare drivers on when they were locked out of working by the Uber and Lyft apps.
New York introduced a law to ensure a minimum rate of pay for rideshare drivers, which is based on a formula which uses a measure of how much time drivers spend with passengers. After drivers started being locked out of working by the rideshare companies, Bloomberg investigated how widespread these lockouts were:
The reporting also includes a calculator which shows how much changes in the utilisation rate could cost the two companies, and some excellent maps showing how the lockouts affected individual drivers.
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4. How global heating is supercharging hurricanes
Hurricanes Milton and Helene have together resulted in hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damages.
With warmer waters driving more powerful storms, my colleagues Oliver Milman and Jonathan Watts have reported on how global heating increased both the amount of rain dumped by Helene, as well as making winds more intense.
Here, NPR has produced an excellent side-by-side comparison of hurricane frequency, and the amount of damage caused over time by severe storms:
You can read more here.
Spotlight on … hurricanes
Hurricane coverage reminded me to check on this classic visualisation of wind conditions around the globe, which has always been one of my favourite pieces of data visualisation
The Gulf of Mexico is absorbing and storing heat at increasingly high levels
Off the Charts
What happens when you merge the map projections for Australia and the United States? This monstrosity, from XKCD:
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