Explore Our Planet

I was quite excited while visiting this UN site: data.un.org. You’ll find a huge amount of figures provided by different UN agencies. The data is free to use, ready to download and presented by a slick WEB2.0 interface. Of cource data from the UNFCCC is there as well as from the american Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC).

The latter provides a data set with CO2 emissions from more than 200 countries ranging from 1980 to 2004. I’ve jumped at this chance and started to develop google maps overlayed with colored countries. SVG was a dead-end, so the next question was how to generate tiles without having any record in hand painting.

GMapCreator was developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London under the GeoVUE (Geographic Virtual Urban Environments) project which is funded as one of the research nodes of the National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS).

In short it picks a shape file, let you colorize the polygons according to their attributes and renders all the tiles down to the level you specify. The world borders shape file from thematicmapping.org (credits to: Bjorn Sandvik, Schuyler Erle, Sean Gilles) was the best solution for this job. The simple version has enough points for a use with level 4. Btw: Quantum GIS is an excellent application for beginners.

Since human senses use logarithmic scales this is the way the map was designed. Also it is easier to distinguish different shades of green than blue. The values correspond to metric kilo tons of CO2.

Blue means no data, countries with an output over one billion tons are colored with dark red. Within these color groups GMapCreator shades the countries according to their past emissions. As a rule of thumb you may say the countries in the orange group emitted 10 times more C02 than the yellow countries.

At first sight the information provided by this interactive map is little: huge countries emit more C02 compared to smaller countries. But given the scale factor it indicates the countries with the most potential to fight Climate Change. Nevertheless the next map in this series will visualize emissions per capita and the United States will then - together with some litte arabian countries - lead this unreasonable competition.

However, this is not the end of this story. CO2 resides for approximatly 100 years in the atmosphere, so taken into account historical emissions will answer the question whose emissions are still heating the planet. Can responsibility-based politics really ignore past emissions?

Stay tuned on this channel.

The NEO Project (NASA Earth Observations) provides an advanced flash interface, map download, analysis features and a full fledged OGC WMS server. The range of available layers are all related to Climate Change and Global Warming.

As a first try ExploreOurPla.net implements 5 layers with interesting data. All of them show combined data of last full month. This leads to full coverage since clouds are elimated. See following examples with direct links to the map interface and the description taken from layer abstract (credits go to NASA).

This map shows the temperature of Earth’s lands during the daytime. Temperature is a measure of how warm or cold an object is. During the day, the Sun’s rays warm Earth’s lands. Some of this warmth rises into the air where gases catch and hold the warmth near the surface. These gases (called greenhouse gases) also help to warm Earth’s land surface.

We can use a thermometer to measure the temperature of any single place. Likewise, scientists can measure the temperature of the whole world from space using instruments carried on satellites. Scientists want to know the land’s temperature for many important reasons. For example, in places where it is too hot or too cold food crops may die.

Temperature also influences weather and climate patterns. So, mapping the temperature of Earth’s lands helps scientists to better understand our world.
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The EU’s public register of industrial emissions to air and water, the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER), was today updated with the latest emissions data from some 12,000 industrial installations across Europe.

The data for 2004 for the first time covers installations in the ten new Member States.

EPER is a register of the emissions produced by large and medium-sized industrial facilities. It covers 50 air and water pollutants. The data in the register comes from facilities in all EU Member States.

The results from the query interface are quite informative. It shows adresses of polluters, CO2 emissions, type of emissions (water, air), amount and more.

Germany’s top CO2 emitter is RWE Power AG with 27,600,000.00 t of CO2 by 2004 an increase of 36,6 per cent since 2001.

At an european scale RWE Power AG is second and BOT Elektrownia Belchat

A two-minute film broadcasted in UK that starts to tell the story of why climate change is happening and why it needs to be tackled together.

Original source: climatechallenge.gov.uk, Quicktime

More: A guide to communicating climate change.

The US Energy Information Administration published yesterday the numbers on the greenhose gas emissions from 2005. The ‘good’ news is the emissions ‘Growth Lower than Average in 2005′.

Quoted from press release:

Total U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 7,147.2 million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 2005, an increase of 0.6 percent from the 2004 level according to Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2005, a report released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Since 1990, GHG emissions have grown at an average annual rate of 1.0 percent. (more…)

The second week in Nairobi started with new ideas, e.g. a more flexible aproach to include more countries and to avoid ‘islands’ of pollution.

Australian’s Environment Minister Ian Campbell’s suggested a ‘New Kyoto’ and earned laughter and the ‘Fossil of the Day’ award for this direction. Australian hasn’t signed Kyoto or established a emissions trading scheme.

He shares this award with Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose quoted in Canadian press saying that Canada is meeting all of its responsibilities under the Kyoto protocol, except for the bit about emissions targets.

Canada has to cut its emissions by 6 percent by 2012 compared with 1990 levels, but it is exceeding this by about one-third and its emissions are on the rise.

EU climate expert Artur Runge Metzger hold a very condensed presentation ‘Battling global climate change - the EU’s perspective’ (part I, part II) showing EU’s strategies to meet the 2

During the development of the geoRSS widget for ExploreOurPla.net I used this list for testing:

It is a mixture of international ressources. Registered users can edit their feed list in the extended profile very easy. Unregistered users have a predefined list, but can browse any feed, when it is properly included in URL.

There are still some issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer, use Firefox instead to avoid them.

Just in case you are still wondering, see geoRSS in action. Next version will have different colored icons for any feed.