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1 month ago | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska |Hannah Ritchie
The world is warming despite natural fluctuations from the El Niño cycle. In 2024, the world was around 1.5°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times.1 You can see this in the chart below, which shows average warming relative to average temperatures from 1861 to 1890.2Temperatures, as defined by “climate”, are based on temperatures over longer periods of time — typically 20-to-30-year averages — rather than single-year data points.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States? To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States. The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then. However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
Economic growth is most important for the world's poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest live on the African continent. Are Africa’s economies growing? The picture is mixed. In some countries, incomes have unfortunately declined in the last decades. This includes Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. I have written about this in my brief explainer on extreme poverty.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
The decline in manufacturing jobs — such as those in factories or industrial plants — often draws significant attention in political debates and media reports in the US, especially when tied to discussions about trade policies, globalization, or job losses in key industries. This focus can sometimes overshadow that manufacturing jobs are already a relatively small part of the labor market. In the US, for example, they account for less than 10% of total employment.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
When it comes to demographic trends, few are as well known as the “baby boom”. The baby boom was a sharp rise in the fertility rate toward the end of the Second World War and for decades after. It happened in several countries around the world, but it was especially pronounced in the United States. Before the baby boom, the US had seen a long-term decline in the fertility rate, down to about 2 children per woman by the 1930s.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
This chart shows average temperatures in the 1940s and 2010s compared to the average from 1991-2020. These differences — called temperature anomalies — help us see how temperatures have changed. We source this data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) . Globally, the 1940s were 0.66°C cooler than the 1991-2020 average, while the 2010s were 0.2°C warmer. This means that over about 70 years, the global average temperature increased by approximately 0.86°C.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first confirmed in 1992 when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail identified two exoplanets orbiting a star located 2,300 light-years from Earth. As shown in this chart, from 1992 to 2005, scientists discovered two hundred more exoplanets. They primarily used a method called "radial velocity".
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Saloni Dattani |Veronika Samborska |Hannah Ritchie |Max Roser
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
According to the latest trade statistics from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the sum of exports and imports across countries amounted to 63% of global GDP in 2022, the most recent year available. This metric, also known as the trade openness index, represents the ratio of total trade (exports plus imports) to global output. The higher this ratio, the greater the influence of international trade transactions on global economic activity.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
ourworldindata.org | Veronika Samborska
July 23, 2024Share this insightSome regions are warming faster than others, and countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region have seen some of the most rapid warming. We observe this through temperature anomalies. Anomalies compare current temperatures to historical averages, showing us shifts over time. In the chart, each bar represents the temperature anomaly for a given year. In 2023, the global average temperature anomaly was 0.6°C above the 1991–2020 average.
