Google Earth Shows Climate Change Effects

A new tool in Google Earth shows you the “effect” of climate change in your area.

Using Google Earth, you can look at climate effects under three different scenarios — 1) Confronting Climate Change — “with Al Gore”, 2) IPCC High Emissions Scenario, and 3) IPCC Low Emissions Scenario. Other new tools let you examine other aspects of climate change and how to adapt to climate change.

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This is one of Google’s efforts to help the lead-in to the climate conference in Copenhagen in December. The internet giant teamed up with the Danish government to create these new tools.

The new tools were launched this Tuesday. The main Google Earth tool helps users to examine the potential impacts of climate change, but additional tools also help users to evaluate ways of adapting to climate change.

Al Gore is the first celebrity leading a Google “tour” on the climate in a whole series of such tours on Google Earth. Additional tours will be launched in coming weeks.

Google’s Benjamin Kott and Jonas Vang said on the Google blog that the company used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to show “the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.”

In another attempt to raise awareness for the Copenhagen conference, Google also recently launched the YouTube COP15 Channel — a beautiful YouTube channel urging us all to raise our voice on climate change.

In addition to raising awareness, Google developed the new Google Earth tools because there is increasing demand from individuals and businesses for tools showing how climate change will affect them.

via BusinessGreen

Image Credit: mark knol via flickr under a Creative Commons license