TEDxPSU: Dr. Michael Mann - A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future

TEDx events are independently organized TED events that follow the general TED format, but are organized locally. I came across Dr. Michael Mann's presentation at TEDxPSU on twitter (follow him: @MichaelEMann). Dr. Mann is known for his extensive research in paleoclimatology- including the Hockey Stick Graph that displays recent, rapid global warming.

ESRI Map of Carbon Dioxide Emissions

ESRI has produced a map that displays carbon dioxide emissions from 1960 to 2008. The map is dynamic in that it allows the user to pick the year, or consecutive years, to display in addition to having the ability to "play" the map as an animated timeline. Another cool feature of the map is that it has two sets of symbology; the map displays countries' total emissions as a color and relative emissions are represented by dots. For more information, including how the map was made, visit ESRI's Map Story Profile.

What Will Climate Change Mean for Australia?

Jeff Goodell, of Rolling Stone, visited Australia to find out:

"I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts."

Read the full article here.

Mapping Climate Change Vulnerability

As this month's conference United Nations Climate Change conference in Durban nears, here is a map, which I first read about on this blog, of climate vulnerability as concluded in a study by Maplecroft:

As shown in the image above, the top ten most vulnerable countries are:

1. Haiti
2. Bangladesh
3. Zimbabwe
4. Sierra Leone
5. Madagascar
6. Cambodia
7. Mozambique
8. Democratic Republic of the Congo
9. Malawi
10. Philippines 

The study combines socioeconomic factors, including such items as poverty and rate of population growth, with physical factors, such as the likelihood of natural hazards occurring.

Visualizing the Anthropocene

Humans' impact on the Earth has been so profound that many scientists are now referring to a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. Arguments for this new era are found in such changes as climatic forcing through greenhouse gas emissions as well as upsetting the nitrogen cycle due to an ever increasing population. A dynamic resource for being able to see what this actually looks like is A Cartography of the Anthropocene. The website, created by Globaïa, features a  variety of maps demonstrating the human effect at the global scale. My favorite, pictured below, is a map of the global transportation system.

The Global Transportation System. Globaïa "is a global education organization whose mission is to foster a consistent and informed participation of citizens in environmental issues by understanding the multiple dimensions of today's world and its likely future."