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Comment by brchr | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to make more sense of some of these CO2 headlines, so I put together a scraper that generates live D3 charts of the most recent CO2 measurements from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and keeps them up to date.

Here’s weekly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co...

Monthly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co...

And yearly (avg): https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-co...

And the really scary one, similar to the recent XKCD, is the ice core data from the NOAA: https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-r...

(Fun fact, Postgres date fields underflow after 4713 BC, but the data actually goes back another 700,000 years!)

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OT: All numer.al graphs are empty in my browser (I can see both axes but there is no line inside the graph). Using Firefox with Adblock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere. PS Temporarily disabling the aforementioned plugins did not help.

@mastazi Thanks for the heads up! I was testing in Chrome and Safari and missed that one completely -- apparently they allow for a circle radius ("r") to be defined in a stylesheet, but Firefox doesn’t. It’s cross-compatible now -- cheers!

Cool! Is numer.al a personal project of yours? Do you have a quick description of the features? By the way it looks good, congrats!

Thank you! Yes, I’ve been working on it as a way both to visualize and to stay current with some of the things I’ve been seeing in the news that are of interest to me, related to the environment, the energy sector, economy, etc. With the election coming up, I’ve been looking a lot at the types of indicators being mentioned in debates (crime, deficit, etc.).

At the moment you can “follow” figures and view a feed of the ones you follow in reverse-chronological order by the time of the latest update (I’m working on an “email me when this changes” option too), and you can drag the thumbnail graphs over one another and drop them to see two numbers compared. The comparison view also gives the option to make your own charts derived from existing ones: e.g., you can make a “per capita” chart by dragging anything over the Census figures and clicking “Proportion.” The “downstream” chart will automatically update when its “upstream” charts do.

It’s very much a work in progress, and if it proves useful, I’d love to hear more from you about the kinds of things that would be of interest to add to it!

Awesome! I've created an account so I can play with it. I believe that fact-checking is increasingly becoming crucial in the political discourse, especially given that many politicians are taking a "relaxed" stance towards it [1]. Luckily, at the same time, there are a number of electors who demand that candidates back their claims with sources [2].

One small and nit-picky suggestion: make sure that the non-www version of numer.al redirects to the www one (currently the former just doesn't seem to work for me).

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-h...

[2] https://xkcd.com/285/

I would love to hear any feedback you might have! I completely agree with you about fact-checking. One mini-feature that’s implemented right now is the ability to select a range in a graph and then copy/paste the URL, and when someone opens it in a new window they’ll see exactly the highlight you made with the same % change displayed. It makes it really easy to back up particular assertions across a time series.

And yes, I was having some issues with the DNS because of the way Heroku interacts with root domains, but that should be sorted as of today and the apex numer.al domain should work just as well as www. Thanks for the heads up!

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