Ecoclimax

Using state-of-the-art 3D graphics and the timing of a stand-up comedian, world-famous statistician Professor Hans Rosling presents a spectacular portrait of our rapidly changing world. With seven billion people already on our planet, we often look to the future with dread, but Rosling's message is surprisingly upbeat. Almost unnoticed, we have actually begun to conquer the problems of rapid population growth and extreme poverty. Across the world, even in countries like Bangladesh, families of just two children are now the norm - meaning that within a few generations, the population explosion will be over. A smaller proportion of people now live in extreme poverty than ever before in human history and the United Nations has set a target of eradicating it altogether within a few decades. In this as-live studio event, Rosling presents a statistical tour-de-force, including his 'ignorance survey', which demonstrates how British university graduates would be outperformed...

Source: World Bank

What did Earth look like 250 million years ago? Or 1 billion years ago? Or 4.5 billion years ago? What was the climate like in the deep past?  Find the answers with EarthViewer, an interactive tool for exploring the science of Earth's deep history. From molten mass to snowball earth, EarthViewer lets you see continents grow and shift as you scroll through billions of years. Additional layers let you and your students explore changes in atmospheric composition, temperature, biodiversity, day length, and solar luminosity over deep time. Online Version Downloadable Version ( PC , Mac-64 , Mac-32 , Apps ) See also: - What did Earth look like 600 million years ago?

The 2015 Fall Foliage Map is the ultimate visual planning guide to the annual progressive changing of the leaves. While no tool can be 100% accurate, this tool is meant to help travelers better time their trips to have the best opportunity of catching peak color each year. Via smokymountains.com

There is a long tradition in the emotional relationship between people and forests. We can get an understanding of the extent of the global tree cover from satellite sensors such as NASA’s MODIS Calculating the average tree cover in an area allows us to estimate the extent of the world’s forests. Forest landscapes can be mapped in various ways and is often done in conventional maps. However, much of the land area is not covered by forest and the few remaining untouched forest landscapes keep shrinking while deforestation continues. This visualisation of the global tree cover shows the quantitative distribution of the world’s forests. In a ‘gridded cartogram’, each of the grid cells shown covers an equal physical space and is then resized according to the total amount of space covered by trees in this area. Additional topographic features showing the elevation similar to normal topographic maps (from green for the lowest lying areas to brown and white for the highest r...

This interective map shows the current sea ice cover in the Arctic.

It’s a simple question: how many trees are there on Earth? The answer required 421,529 measurements from fifty countries on six continents. Now this new data has been combined to produce a stunning visualisation of our planet as you’ve never seen it before. The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well as the overwhelming effect of humans across most of the world. Based on our pro...