Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Breathing Earth—Watch real-time changes in emissions, population

Friday, November 20th, 2009

One of the challenges of environmental literacy is to help people visualize information so that it’s easy to digest.  The Breathing Earth Simulation is a new graphic simulation that allows people to watch the geography of carbon emission, births, and deaths real time.

As you can see from the graphic above, in the short time I watched, world population rose by almost 2000 people, and more than 500,000 tons of CO₂ were emitted.  Countries glow red every time 1000 tons of CO₂ is emitted—about every 5 seconds for the U.S.

This is a good first step, but they could do more.  Most people can’t relate directly to tonnage of CO₂.  547,000 tons?  Is that a lot or not much if you don’t know that Earth’s atmosphere holds 750 billion tons of carbon and annual emissions are ~9 billion tons of carbon?  Emissions masses could also be represented in more familiar equivalencies—e.g., numbers of Empire State Buildings, total world grain harvests, number of cars piled on top of one another, combined weight of a group of people, etc.

Related post: Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy