Aaron

Brodkin
P6
11-19-2015

Do High CO2 Emissions Make You Carbon DIE- Oxide?

Every country emits Carbon Dioxide: the ominous substance goes hand in hand with

pollution as one of the most widely known greenhouse gases on the planet, everyone knows
what it is. But does it directly affect how long we will live? This is the question that has been
hiding in the back of my head for years, but Ive never had the chance to explore until this
project. An example of a career that would find this data to be helpful is any person who works
for a factory whose job it is to cut down on CO2 emissions. This question struck me as
particularly important, because not only does it affect me and you, it also affects every other
organism on earth that breathes air. So naturally I wondered if the United States, one of the
highest CO2 emitting countries in the world, had a lower life expectancy than countries with
lower emission levels. So come explore with me, I think itll be a gas!

Many conclusions can be drawn from the above scatterplot, but before we dive into

that, the variables must be discussed first. The explanatory variable in this specific instance is
the CO2 emissions, while the response variable is the life expectancy in years. In other words,
CO2 emissions is the independent variable because the amount of emissions can be controlled
by the country, whereas the life expectancy is the dependent variable because it can be
explained by the emission levels. As for outliers, there are several for both variables. For CO2
emissions, Australia (16.7 metric tons per capita), Aruba (24.2 metric tons per capita), and

Bahrain (18.4 metric tons per capita), are all outliers because they stuck out of the box and
whisker plot (shown below).

For Life Expectancy there were only two outliers, Afghanistan (59.6 years) and Angola (51.1
years). This was also determined by the box and whisker plot shown below.


Although there is a low amount of outliers, there is an even smaller amount of influential
points. These include the countries of Afghanistan and Angola. Afghanistan only emits .3 metric
tons per capita, and has a life expectancy of 60 years, while Angola only emits 1.4 metric tons of
CO2 per capita and has a life expectancy of 51.1 years. If both of these points were to be
removed, there would be a slight increase in the line of best fit.

Although I originally expected there to be a definite relationship between CO2 emission

and how long a person is expected to live, upon finding the r value for the strength of
correlation, I am persuaded to think otherwise. The calculated r value for these two
quantitative bivariate data sets is .4776714352, which means that there is a moderately weak

correlation between emission levels and life expectancy. The R squared value is .22817, which
means that approximately 23% of the variance of life expectancy can be explained by the
emission levels.

After running a linear regression on the data, a least squares regression equation can be

calculated fairly quickly. This equation comes out to be yhat = 68.91195 + 0.552284(x). In other
words, the predicted value of y equals the y- intercept plus the coefficient of regression, or
slope, times x. What this equation specifically means is that without any pollution at all, the life
expectancy of a person in said country would live to be 68.91195 years old. Although this
sounds like the truth at first glance, it is actually deceiving because life expectancy depends on
many hidden factors such as how advanced the country is and their access to medical care. The
slope is stating that with every metric ton per capita of CO2 emission, the life expectancy of the
country is projected to increase by 0.552284 years.

A residual plot as formed by the data shows a very straight line.


This indicates that a linear regression is not a great fit for this set of data, because the residual
plot points should be essentially random. In order to test the accuracy of my linear regression
equation, I chose to input the point 1.4 into my linear regression equation to find a predicted
value of 69.643926, which is higher than the actual value by 18.543926 years. The residual
value, as found by subtracting the predicted value from the actual value comes out to be
-17.81195.

This regression turned out to be quite different than previously expected. It turns out

that there is a moderately weak correlation between the CO2 emissions of a country and the
life expectancy that it provides. Perhaps If more data points were selected, the data would be

different, but with the provided data it appears that there is little correlation between the two
variables. However, this could be explained by a presence of hidden variables, such as how
large the countrys population is as well as access to medical care and abundance of wealth.
Works Cited
"World DataBank." The World Bank DataBank. The World Bank, n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.