Google Earth peers into California's eco-future

Google Earth and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday that Google is developing a tool to map out disturbing scenarios of how California can be affected by climate change.

The project comes out of a collaboration with the California Natural Resources Agency, Schwarzenegger, and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an organization funded by the California Energy Commission and Google.org.

"There is a serious bottleneck in delivering relevant information, much of which is map-based, to decisionmakers in a manner that allows them to turn climate change research results into effective climate change adaptation decisions and policies," according to a statement from SEI.

The CalAdapt Google Earth tool, which will allow individuals to view how their specific community would be changed, will not be ready for public use until September 2010. But on Wednesday, Google.org released two related videos narrated by Schwarzenegger. Both the three-minute video (see below) and seven-minute video demonstrate the kind of data the Google Earth CalAdapt tool will make more palatable. The extended version additionally highlights Schwarzenegger's concerns and political initiatives.

CalAdapt visually demonstrates the effects of climate change as determined by the current scientific data available to the state of California. It includes past data regarding temperature change and water shortages. It includes data modeling what will happen if, for example, the Sierra snow pack disappears at the various rates predicted. It also includes data on which parts of the state's shoreline would be most effected due to storms and rising sea levels.

Certainly, it's a teaching tool to show average folks what scientists believe will happen to the California climate in the coming years. But it also happens to dovetail into Schwarzenegger's executive order that the state develop a "Climate Adaptation Strategy" on everything from agriculture to commercial land development.

It's not the first time, organizations have turned to the Google Earth platform to give the public a tool for avoiding land misuse or harrowing legal battles.

In April Google Earth released the Path to Green Energy tool. Those layers, developed in conjunction with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society, show which lands in the greater western U.S. are prohibited from commercial development, awaiting approval for inclusion into the federal wilderness system, or considered natural habitats for endangered species among other categories.

It's intended to be a preemptive offering to commercial developers who may rather shy away from the hassle of an environmental fight if there are adequate lands available for their needs elsewhere.

Google.org unveils deforestation monitor

Google.org demonstrated a new platform on Thursday that, if implemented in conjunction with a proposed United Nations program, could provide a significant tool to combat climate change.

Its new "high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine" can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online.

The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period.

The platform could be used as a tool for countries to conform to REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), a program proposed by the United Nations.

If REDD is implemented, it would require member nations to monitor the state of their forests and land use. It would offer money in exchange for those nations preventing people from cutting down forests deemed significant to curbing emissions. The aim of the program is to essentially make the trees worth more alive than loggers could make from chopping them down or than farmers could make from converting forestland into farmland.

The benefit of the program is based on the recommendations of several reports, most notably the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" report conducted by the U.K. government.

The Stern Review report's analysis on land use change (PDF) found that keeping forests intact is one of the most cost-effective ways to quickly cut annual world carbon emissions. The reticence in implementing REDD has been over how the program would be administered, and how forests would be accurately monitored in developing nations where technological resources are limited.

"We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships, and trains worldwide," Google.org said on its blog.

Currently, the program is in a testing phase with plans from Google.org to "make it more broadly available over the next year." The organization also said it's willing to provide the platform as a "not-for-profit service," an indication that the satellite imagery may not be freely available to the general public, but restricted to scientists, governments, or environmental monitoring agencies.

Google Earth has been providing satellite imagery of forests over time, but an accurate way to quickly and sufficiently analyze the incoming raw satellite imagery data was not readily available, according to Google.org. This new platform provides that missing analysis, the group said.

The platform was developed in conjunction with Greg Asner, professor of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and of the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University; and Carlos Souza, a geologist at Imazon, the Amazon Institute for the People and Environment.

Toyota to sell 'affordable' plug-in hybrids in '11

Toyota Motor will begin selling "affordable" plug-in hybrid cars in 2011, upping the ante on General Motors and Nissan Motor as they aim to take the lead in the field of rechargeable cars.

Toyota's first plug-in model, the Prius Plug-In Hybrid (PHV), will add an external charging function and more batteries to the popular Prius to enable longer-distance driving on electricity alone.

Because it can also run on gasoline, plug-in hybrids--such as GM's upcoming Volt due for sale next year--eliminate the "range anxiety" seen as one of the main shortcomings of battery-powered pure electric cars.

The Prius PHV can travel 14.5 miles using only the electric motor, making a short commute possible on zero emissions, Toyota said. On a full charge and full tank of gas, the car could theoretically travel 870 miles, it said.

Vintage AOL: Adventures in Digital Age archaeology

This year for Christmas, I finally decided to give my family something that they've been asking me about for more or less the past five years: I told them that I would clean my room.

No, really. I moved out of my childhood home years ago, but more or less shut the door to my room and didn't change a thing. It's sort of a late '90s-early '00s teenage time capsule. There was stuff in there that had not been touched since the Clinton administration. There were magazines with Justin Timberlake on the cover from an era when nobody expected he'd be cast as a Silicon Valley hotshot in a movie directed by the "Fight Club" guy. There were varsity letters and prom photos and model rockets and Warped Tour '01 memorabilia and pretty much whatever else you'd expect to find in the living space of a kid who came of age in the era of "Can't Hardly Wait" and "Dawson's Creek."

That inventory included one almost perfectly preserved AOL 7.0 installer disc, a CD-ROM that boasts "Faster Than Ever!" and offers 1,025 free hours of access or 45 days, whichever comes first, with no credit card required. (1,025 hours is slightly under 42 days.) On the red-and-gold packaging is the face of a Japanese anime-style character, the edges of the drawing blurred to make the marketing message absolutely clear: This is fast. This is the future.

AOL 7.0 was released on October 16, 2001, right in the depths of post-9/11 turmoil and some of the darkest hours for the dot-com industry. It was also less than a year after America Online's historic $165 billion merger with Time Warner, now regarded as one of the most disastrous business decisions of the past decade. It was also right around the time I turned 17 and flunked my driver's test; in hindsight I clearly should've been honing my skills of coordination by playing more video games.

A press release from October 16 hails version 7.0 as having "a fresh new look that puts local, community-focused features, shopping and resources front and center throughout the service to make AOL an even more relevant and valuable part of members' daily lives." Then-CEO Barry Schuler offered a sound bite, saying "We're building on our strong, engaged relationships with more than 31 million members worldwide to lead the transformation of new categories like music, entertainment, local, and digital photography--with more on the way as broadband and AOL Anywhere create new opportunities like home networking."

I don't exactly remember why I had that CD stashed away, but I'm willing to surmise that I was keeping it around in the case of a dial-up nuclear winter--i.e. if my parents came across a less-than-stellar calculus grade and responded by silencing the Internet connection that sucked away some of the time that I might have been spending on homework otherwise. With that shiny disc, I could somehow figure out a 45-day lifeline.