Federico Pistono

Google has announced on its official blog that it has developed some very interesting new features of Google Earth to coincide with the Copenhagen climate conference, which, as we all know, is only a matter of weeks away.

In December of this year, representatives from nations around the globe will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global agreement on climate change. The objective is to reduce global warming emissions sufficiently in order to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change and to support the global community in adapting to the unavoidable changes ahead. Denmark will act as host for this fifteenth Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, known as COP15.

In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!

Together with the Danish government, we're also launching our YouTube COP15 channel. On the channel, you can submit your thoughts and questions on climate change to decision-makers and the world through an initiative called "Raise Your Voice." These videos will be broadcast on screens around the conference in December and rated by viewers of the channel. The top-rated contributions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN/YouTube debate on December 15th, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen. We look forward to seeing your videos!

You can see the tours directly on your browser by installing the plugins, which I did. It's interesting to finally have a visual representation what you can navigate through of of any location on earth up till the year 2100, that is, according to both the IPCC's high and low emissions scenarios. Still, it's the best we have to offer, and it's reasonable to assume that these prediction, though not 100% accurate, might be not so far from the truth.

The most interesting part of this project is, in my humble opinion, not the apocalyptic scenarios of places submerged underwater, million of refugees and glaciers melting, but rather the possible tangible and concrete solution that we can adopt to solve the problem and avoid these scenarios in the first place. There's a whole section dedicated to this purpose, and according to Google, more to come.

I embedded the whole playlist of the "Google Earth tours for COP15 tours", which i think will be automatically updated once these videos grow. As The Guardian suggests, it would be nice, too, if the crowd-sourcing potential of Google Maps could somehow be exploited by users. What additional layers of information would you like to see? Predicted impacts on habitats? Likely spread of malaria endemic areas? Data showing variations in public attitudes to the threat of climate change? Regional increases (and decreases) in human population? The location of existing and planned nuclear power stations? Over to you.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.