
Global Weirding: Visualizing Climate Change - ingve
http://globalweirding.is/here
======
josho
I love good visualizations, this one is neat. Unfortunately the visuals don't
carry much data with it. That is, it didn't tell me anything that I didn't
already know--climate change will provide more extreme (hot/cold) weather
patterns.

Even worse, viewing this almost makes me less inclined to worry about climate
change. That is in nearly a decade the leading headline is jellyfish closing
down a power plant. Hmm, ok, let's spend trillions of dollars to fix climate
change, or a few million to upgrade power plant water intake systems to
protect against jellyfish swarms.

So, seeing this I sadly now understand why politicians and companies are
greenwashing everything. Talk is cheap and will get you support, but the
consequences of the problem won't be seen until you are well into retirement.

~~~
mckoss
Do you have any reference for an IPCC claim that global warming will cause
deeper cooling??? I've not seen it, though I've read all the IPCC summaries.
Reference, please.

~~~
jakethedog
It is not deeper cooling in the global average temperature but periods of
intense cold during the winter. There is debate in the scientific community
with some arguing that melting sea ice causes an increase in frequency of
polar vortex events while others think these events are controlled by pacific
ssts.

~~~
astrodust
Melting polar ice is really screwing with the jetstream and that's altering
winter weather patterns pretty severely.

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codingdave
Triangles! Triangles everywhere! And speculative headlines!

And a very important point trying to be made. But in this case the
visualizations actually reduced value, making it more about the bells and
whistles, and less about the actual message.

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DanKlinton
Sounds like my MacBook just contributed some heat to global warming because of
this visualization

~~~
kermit666
My thoughts exactly. Wonder how much CO2 was emitted just to power the
animations in the background :P

~~~
herge
If you assume staying on the page for 15 minutes with an Mac Book power supply
of 85w, it's about 0.05 kg to 11.3 kg depending on where in North America you
are.

~~~
SapphireSun
At 20 deg C, 1 atm, and using the high estimate of 11.3kg, PV = nRT, which is

V

    
    
        n = 11300 g / 44 g/mol = 256.82 mol
        R = 8.314 L kPa K−1 mol−1
        T = 293 K
        P = 101.3 kPA
    
     = (256.82 * 8.314 * 293 / 101.3) L
    
     = 6175.8 liters
    
     = 3087.9 uncapped coke bottles every 15 minutes (high estimate)
    

At the low estimate:

n = 50 / 44 = 1.13 mol

So:

V = 27.33 L

    
    
      = 13.7 uncapped coke bottles every 15 minutes (low estimate)
    
    

Where did you get the mass estimates from?

~~~
herge
The EPA and Environment Canada.

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towelguy
I don't really see what's wrong with the climate changing. It has happened
before. People just want to mantain the status quo.

~~~
josho
Yes, you are right. There is nothing wrong with climate change, it has
happened before, it will happen again. The problem is the timescale of the
change. In the past changes occurred over centuries, we are causing the change
in decades. That timescale risks catastrophe.

If you genuinely want to understand then I recommend reading Storms of My
Grandchildren by James Hansen, or at least googling a few book reviews to get
a sense.

~~~
SapphireSun
[http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-2-...](http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-2-1-1.html)

It may be worse than that... Those charts show higher levels of several
greenhouse gases than has occurred in hundreds of thousands of years, not
centuries.

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phy6
From the graphs, apparently there is no future in which I'm allowed to accept
a lot of nuclear power into the mix.

~~~
ArtDev
Nuclear power is simply unaffordable. There are better, cheaper alternatives.
(I am not even talking about the nuclear waste problem)

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rcthompson
I think the globe visualization would be more useful if it factored out the
seasonal cycle of temperature changes and just showed the smooth change in
average yearly temperature instead. As it is, everything cycles between hot
and cold every year and it's difficult to tell if the amplitude is changing.

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dreadsword
Dear god. Who is it that thinks these crazy visualizations add any kind of
value to whatever message they're trying to communicate?

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evenwestvang
Hm, me for one. Would you care to elaborate on your exasperation?

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gone35
(Not the parent but) If I may,

The key point is that _communication is expensive_ [1]. And not just because
bandwidth is physically expensive, or the opportunity costs of waiting about,
or the usability nightmares that inevitably ensue; but also because decoding
itself is mentally taxing. And _every_ panache adds up to it. So it better be
worth to the recipient.

So when you double-down like you did, Flash-era intros and all; and it turns
out all there is to it is a sparse bunch of unnavigable, decontextualized[2],
tweet-sized digests of a policymakers' digest; and on top you can't even turn
the damn globe on your own to explore the simulation results yourself
(arguably the _sole_ reason to be using WebGL at all!); then... well, I hope
you see why your site would be so exasperating.

[1] [http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

[2] Pro tip: leaving uncertainty terms to the 'for climate nerds' section is
borderline unethical.

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julienchastang
Cool geodesic grid. [1] [1]
[http://kiwi.atmos.colostate.edu/pubs/CISE.pdf](http://kiwi.atmos.colostate.edu/pubs/CISE.pdf)

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lynchdt
It's all hunky dory, mostly, until you jump from 2090 to 2100. At that point
the apocalypse hits, obviously.

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nrzuk
Crashed chrome on my mac! Also how are you suppose to scroll without a
touchpad?!

~~~
evenwestvang
Sorry about that, we had lots of trouble with WebGL in Chrome under Yosemite.
It did seem to clear up with a new release from Google a few days ago.

The click-drag interaction on desktop is slightly goofy. We discussed adding
cursor key and clickable arrows for previous and next, but concluded that it
wasn't that bad. It's super nice on touchpads and touch.

~~~
aquadrop
It works awful in chrome under Windows too. Firefox is alright though.

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maxharris
And what is the big picture? What is the effect on human beings? Fortunately,
we have the data on this.

In the last 80 years, global deaths caused by climate (droughts, floods,
hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons) have declined by 98%, all because
people had cheap, reliable energy provided by fossil fuels.

Source:
[http://www.emdat.be/advanced_search/index.html](http://www.emdat.be/advanced_search/index.html)
\- click on "Natural," and add subgroups "Climatological," "Meteorological,"
"Hydrological."

Because I prefer being alive, I'd much rather live in a warmer world (or one
with weather that has changed is some unnatural way) than to lose the cheap,
plentiful sources of energy that serve to protect me from an inherently
dangerous climate.

~~~
josho
I don't appreciate your straw man attack. I honestly don't recall ever hearing
anyone argue that we should abandon fossil fuels outright. Instead what I hear
from most people is a desire to increase research into alternative energy
sources and evolve from fossil fuels to something new and better.

Keep in mind this energy transition has occurred before, back in the 16th
century. The UK used to depend on wood for its energy. The US led in adopting
coal, which was used only marginally for thousands of years. Coal was dirty,
it stank, required new technologies to collect and distribute, while wood was
cheap and plentiful. As it turns out coal was fundamental to the industrial
revolution, the US as a leader in coal developed new industries and led in
industrialization and leap frogged Britain.

I see human kind at the same crossroads, but with bigger stakes. Do we want to
stick with fossil fuels until we potentially destroy our climate or can we
discover new sources that will potentially introduce a new energy revolution,
and who do we want leading this new energy revolution?

~~~
maxharris
> I honestly don't recall ever hearing anyone argue that we should abandon
> fossil fuels outright.

Bill McKibben (founder and leader of 350.org) endorses a 95% ban on fossil
fuels. He says that oil companies are "Public Enemy Number One to the survival
of our planetary civilization."

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Mithaldu
Fairly broken in Opera 12.

Edit: And in other browsers where it shows stuff, it's a visual clusterfuck. I
wonder if the "heatmap" on that globe is based off any real data, or just a
plasma function with a curve.

~~~
kristofferj
Sorry. It should work in the latest Opera. The heatmap on the globe are actual
data stored in PNG-files. If you want to read more about how we did it, you
can read more about the project on
[http://bengler.no/global_weirding](http://bengler.no/global_weirding)

~~~
Mithaldu
I'm sorry to see that the product communication of Opera ASA has confused you
as well. Opera 15+ is not "the latest" Opera, but merely a clone of chrome
that shares quite earnestly and literally zero code with Opera 12 (which is
the latest of its respective line); and will likely never be a viable upgrade
vector due to also sharing almost none of the features of Opera 12.

Also, thanks for the further reading link. :)

It's quite interesting already. And i note in the gif down the middle of the
page that on mobile only one event is ever on screen, while in chrome i often
had 5+ on screen, with very little space inbetween them. If you spaced it out
more on desktop, it would become much more grokkable.

Edit: There's also the fact that i have a hard time distinguishing between
land and see, between the globe rotating wildly and the colors washing across
it.

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swalsh
What would be great is if you could combine this with actions people can take
to make reductions, and the results of that. Like one of those primer timeline
visualizations.

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jayshahtx
This caused the spinning wheel of death on my maxed out MBP...am I alone?

