Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Missouri's Environmental Statistics

Check out http://mogreenstats.com/ for a blog dedicated to providing information on Missouri's Environmental Statistics. Add this too your blog roll. Make a note to check this out every week and keep current with information you can learn from, use, share and understand.

I've worked on related projects with the blog author and know him to be a hard working man with integrity, intellectual clarity and patience.

Here is an excerpt from his about this blog page:


Mogreenstats focuses on environmental statistics and reports for the State of Missouri. I don’t focus on environmental news, advocacy, or projects. Other websites already do that, and they do it well. Rather, I find what I believe are authoritative studies and reports. I summarize the main conclusions, provide a couple of graphs that describe some of the more important findings, and link to the primary sources. I also provide a little “back of the envelope” analysis to provide context.
There are lots of ways to read the blog. You can read the last 10 posts on the blog’s home page, most recent at the top. You can search for specific content using the search function. You can read posts by category by clicking on the category name at the top of the page. You can see a list of all posts by clicking on “List of all posts” on the left side of the home page. And finally, you can browse previous posts by month by clicking on the Archive menu, which is on the left side of the home page.
The thumbnails of the graphs are a little small when viewed embedded in a post. To see the full sized image, click on the graph. When you’re done looking at the graph, use your browsers “back” function to return to the post.
My name is John May. I’m a retired psychologist. For four years I had the privilege of leading the City of Creve Coeur’s efforts to conduct a GHG inventory and develop a climate action plan, and I’ve also been involved with a number of other municipal GHG inventories/climate action plans in one way or another.
Several years ago, I prepared a series of white papers on the environment in Missouri for a political candidate. The greatest challenge I faced was finding authoritative data and putting it in a context that made it meaningful; the data is widely dispersed, I didn’t know if it existed, and I spent hours looking for it, digging through confusing websites. Mogreenstats is an attempt to make finding that sort of data a little bit easier.
I focus on reports posted by government bodies (could be federal, state, or local). For the most part, these reports are public domain, which reduces copyright issues. I will also include information from some studies that are published in peer reviewed journals. I will consider reports from nonprofit think tanks on a case-by-case basis, but only if they are also published in a peer reviewed journal. There is no such thing as completely objective or authoritative information, but this seems to me about as close as one can come.