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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.

The proliferation of jellyfish in the oceans may be a fairly bad sign, although to what extent the problem is climate change vs all the other bad things humans do to the oceans is up for grabs. The science--like the science of climate itself--is not even remotely close to "settled", but there is cause for concern:

http://www.wunderground.com/news/oceans-may-be-primed-jellyf...

It's also worth remembering that the Earth's climate over most of the 20th century was amazingly stable by historical norms. Year-to-year variation was fantastically small compared to the kind of thing seen pretty routinely in the past few thousand years. There were no multi-decadal mega-droughts, no dramatic swings in northern hemisphere temperatures of the kind seen in the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period, and so on.

It follows from this that even a return to natural variability is going to be challenging for us, and it's unlikely that the 1.6 W/m^2 that anthopogenic greenhouse gasses are adding to the mix is going to make things any calmer. Adding energy to chaotic systems rarely makes them more stable, and while the detailed consequences of the additional energy are unclear (despite what the "science is settled" folks claim) there is very little doubt that we are adding 1 - 2 W/m^2 to the Earth's energy budget.

That said, here's a relatively agnostic argument for carbon taxes, which the data show are pretty effective at curtailing greenhouse emissions: most carbon tax schemes are designed such that the revenue they generate allows governments to lower corporate taxes and person income taxes. Now, unless you're a wild-eyed socialist revolutionary who hates wealth and capitalism, you're likely in favour of lower corporate taxes and personal income taxes. I know I am. I would far rather have a tax on something bad (dumping waste into the atmospheric commons) than something good (income!) So I think there's an argument to be made for carbon taxes that even the most ardent capitalist can like, if not love.

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.
In the last few years many in north america we were introduced to a new phrase 'polar vortex' which has been unstable and resulted in colder winter storms, yet as I understand a milder winter overall. Read more here on it's relation to climate change http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/sci...

Regardless you are getting hung up on 'colder', the key is more extreme weather. To that point the IPCC does mention more extreme storms, if you want a reference googling that yourself will bring up plenty.

I'll assume you live in sunny California and extreme weather to you means rainstorms not crazy ass cold polar vortex dumps of snow and ice.

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.
Melting polar ice is really screwing with the jetstream and that's altering winter weather patterns pretty severely.
it's probably pretty useful for ppl who can't really bother to read up on climate change. probably a lot of ppl.

so yeah, sure, some jellyfish close down a power plant, but it probably causes loads of financial losses... i think this actually already happened? we are probably looking at complete collapses in housing, transport, sanitation and health in the coming decades if politicians and companies keep at the greenwashing. as an anarchist i don't care, but too bad for all those suckers who got kids and worry about their future.

>we are probably looking at complete collapses in housing, transport, sanitation and health in the coming decades

Right. You won't need a retirement fund because you will rule the apocalyptic wasteland.

probably not. suppose what kinda retirement plan you got? i'm not hedging my bets on my state pension plan, that stuff will go bankrupt long before i get to see any kind of pay off.
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.

Sounds like my MacBook just contributed some heat to global warming because of this visualization
My thoughts exactly. Wonder how much CO2 was emitted just to power the animations in the background :P
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.
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?
It's funny that my iPad 4 handled the animations without a problem.
And the site is borderline-unusable with a mouse... :|
I don't really see what's wrong with the climate changing. It has happened before. People just want to mantain the status quo.
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.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-2-...

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.

For starters, moving the majority of the world's population uphill to escape the rising oceans is going to be kind of expensive.
This climate change will lead to a much shittier world for humans to live on. What's wrong with trying to avoid that?
From the graphs, apparently there is no future in which I'm allowed to accept a lot of nuclear power into the mix.
Nuclear power is simply unaffordable. There are better, cheaper alternatives. (I am not even talking about the nuclear waste problem)
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.
Dear god. Who is it that thinks these crazy visualizations add any kind of value to whatever message they're trying to communicate?
People with "we should make it this complicated because we can" attitude. In other words, people who'd rather show off their skills instead of solving a problem.

This hurts the users because they have to spend more time/effort, it hurts the cause/business because some users just give up, and it hurts the reputation of the web design profession because people then associate them with complex solutions which is definitely not the outcome they are (or, should be) aiming for.

I'm not the authority on this subject but my idea is that the designers are more successful when they can present very complicated information in a more basic way without sacrificing usability. The problem could be getting paid by the complexity of the outcome, rather than the utility. Just a guess.

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

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

Cool geodesic grid. [1] [1] http://kiwi.atmos.colostate.edu/pubs/CISE.pdf
It's all hunky dory, mostly, until you jump from 2090 to 2100. At that point the apocalypse hits, obviously.
Crashed chrome on my mac! Also how are you suppose to scroll without a touchpad?!
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.

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

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?

> 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."

> 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 realise it's tangential to the article, but where on earth did you learn your history of the industrial revolution [0]? Presumably in the USA?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

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.

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
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.

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