What is this blog about?

We are destroying the planet at an alarming rate. It's happening due to the ignorance of the world we live in, and in our age of online data access and sharing there is really no excuse for that any more.

This blog investigates novel ways of looking at large datasets. The kind everyone should care about.


This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Greenhouse gas map for Kyoto parties

The Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) collects national data on greenhouse gas emisssions for the parties in the Kyoto protocol.

Here's the map of the UNFCCC inventory data showing emissions for 40 Kyoto countries plus EU. The data contain absolute emissions for 1990 to 2006, as well as the deltas. The map shows the totals plus breakdown by individual sectors like energy, industry, agriculture and others.

Terms that could be unfamiliar:

LULUCF means "land use, land-use change and forestry".

"Base year" is 1990 for most, but not all countries.

"International bunkers" are emissions from ships and aviation. They are not included in country totals.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Here's my post on the Google LatLon blog about the map I've created for Vulcan, a project computing US CO2 emissions run by Dr Kevin Gurney at Purdue University.

Vulcan released the first round of data in April 2008, and yesterday more details and an interactive map showing state and county absolute and per capita emissions were added. Individual power plants and airports show up too. The page uses the Google Earth browser plugin, but if you are running Linux or you just want to look at the raw KML layers, you can load the top-level page in Google Earth. It's using network links, so you won't wind up pulling everything in at once.

Here's a KML flythrough tour and the video produced from it: