I Fell in Love with Gigasheet Performing Climate Change Data Analysis

Climate change is real – it keeps me up at night. And honestly, I’m not alone.

Since you’re reading this post, you’re concerned about climate change as well. Or maybe, you want to see the data for yourself to see what all the fuss is about?

Jason Hines, the cofounder of Gigasheet, takes climate change so seriously that he personally reached out to me and asked me to write a post on this topic.

As I was conducting my research, here’s what I found out:

“The past eight years are currently on track to be the eight warmest on record. And it’s due to the ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations as well as accumulated heat. Devastating flood, extreme heatwaves, and droughts have impacted millions of lives and cost billions of dollars in 2022.”  

But, we want the data to speak for itself! Jason asked me to download Climate TRACE’s emissions data, which is free and publicly available, and make it viewable for everyone to explore. Online, the data is in separate files for each sector or by country. But what if it was all in one place, and ready to explore?

I did that using Gigasheet, an online CSV viewer, that is free to use and has simple features for data exploration and analysis. It also has the ability to merge CSV files, so I was able to make all of the Climate TRACE data available in a single file.

In this blog, I am going to show you how I did that and why I fell in love with Gigasheet again, but if you want to just see the data now, here it is - no signup required!

Download All Sector-Based Climate Change Datasets & Upload Them to Gigasheet

I believe – you can’t reduce gas emissions if you don’t really know where they’re coming from. After all, there’s a popular saying – “You can only manage what you measure.”

So – let’s analyze country-level emissions by sector.

You can download the sector-based datasets right here.

Climate Trace Sector Based Datasets

And I uploaded them to Gigasheet – your very own Big Data Cloud Spreadsheet. The Climate Trace datasets will be downloaded as ZIP files.

The best part about using Gigasheet – you don’t need to unzip your files before uploading them to our platform. You can directly upload your ZIP files to Gigasheet and our platform will automatically extract them. In fact, you can upload spreadsheet files in different formats and from different sources –

Upload Spreadsheet to Gigasheet

Exciting, isn’t it?

I went ahead and uploaded all my datasets inside a folder named “Climate Trace.”

Gigasheet processing files

All the CSVs were uploaded and processed in less than a minute – honestly it depends on the size of your file(s). But once your files are uploaded, Gigasheet doesn’t take much time to process them.

Spreadsheet uploaded to Gigasheet

Climate Change Data Analysis Using Gigasheet

The best thing about using Gigasheet – it’s so easy to play around with your data – as you can combine your CSV files, apply different filters, group data by column, enrich your data, and do so much more. Allow me to show you all actions I performed to dive deep into the data.

Analyzing Mineral Extraction Emissions Data

Did you know that the mining and quarrying sector is responsible for 4% - 7% of CO2 emissions globally?

But the big problem is – this sector is subject to poor emissions monitoring.

Why?

Most countries don’t report emissions as part of their commitments under UNFCCC – which stands for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Download (GitHub) Mineral Extraction Sector Methodology PDF by Climate TRACE here.

Inside the Mineral Extraction folder, I found the following files:

Mineral Extraction folder

We’ll just focus on country-specific mineral emission CSVs.

Did you know that you can combine CSV files with the same format using Gigasheet? That’s right. It's as easy as pushing a button!

I didn’t want to individually analyze these CSVs one by one. So – I just combined them – easier for me.

Combine CSVs

You can check out this combined CSV here. No Sign Up or Log In required!

If you hop onto the CSV file, you’ll see the following column groups –

1. ISO3 Country
2. Start Time
3. End Time
4. Original Inventory Sector
5. Gas
6. Emissions Quantity
7. Emissions Quantity Units
8. Temporal Granularity
9. Created Date
10. Modified Date

If required, you can just hide or unhide one or more column groups by unchecking or checking them here:

Hide or unhide one or more column groups by unchecking or checking them

Let’s group data by gas. Allow me to show you how to do it:

Group data by gas

I don’t want to seem biased – but just look at how fast Gigasheet grouped the data. Let’s add another layer of grouping – let’s group CO2 emissions by country.

Here’s how to do it:  

Group data by gas and country

In case Gigasheet considers an integer or decimal column group as text, then you can just change the data type in a few clicks. I encountered the same problem with the column group “Emissions Quantity.”

How to Change Data Type in Gigasheet

So I changed the data type to integer.

Here’s how:

I changed the data type to integer.

NOTE – The changes won’t be applied to the original column group – instead a new duplicate column group will be created with the changes made like this:

Now, let’s again group the data by gas and then calculate the total emission count. Here’s how you can do it:

Calculate the total emission count

As you can see – the total CO2 emission count is 376,106,216.

Now, let’s hit the reset button (remove all grouping) and add a filter or two.

I wanted to check gas emissions by Zimbabwe. Here’s how I did it:

Gas emissions by Zimbabwe

Boom! I narrowed down the data in no time.

Now – let’s add another filter. I want to check CO2 gas emissions by Zimbabwe. So – I’ll add another filter on top of this filter.

And there I have it:

CO2 gas emissions by Zimbabwe

Other Data Exploration Tools in Gigasheet

Let’s play around more.

Wondering if that’s all Gigasheet can do?

NOPE!

Gigasheet Meme

Let’s play around with Pivot Tables for better grouping and analysis.

I set the Row Group as Gas, column group as ISO Country, and Values as the Sum of Emissions Quantity.

Gigasheet Pivot Tables

And here are the results:

Gigasheet Pivot Mode Result

You can easily play around with the Pivot mode to get your hands on valuable information in an arranged manner. Similarly, I can set different row groups, column groups, and values inside the pivot mode – depending on what I want to get my hands on.

Oh BTW – did I tell you about other impressive features (I hadn’t tried them up until now):

• Explode Date – You can explode the date and time into different columns:

How to Explode Date in Spreadsheet

• Combine Columns – Yes, you can combine columns. After exploding the date, I combined the year, month, and day columns. We advise adding a separator.

How to Combine Columns in Spreadsheet

How to Combine Columns in Spreadsheet Result

• Calculations – You can perform calculations like you do in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

And more!

And the best part is – we aren’t done building Gigasheet.

Every week, we roll out regular updates to our platform. Jason informs about the updates in Gigasheet Slack Community:

Gigasheet Update

Jason Talks About Climate Change in His Video!

Jason also wanted to analyze the gas emissions across different sectors – so not only did he analyze mineral extraction datasets but also combined datasets from different sectors into one file. Feel free to check out the video:

Click here to access his spreadsheet on Gigasheet. No Sign Up or Log In required!

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