The Climate Change Progress Bar

The Problem

Over the last cou­ple years, I’ve no­ticed a grow­ing dis­tinc­tion be­tween two groups of peo­ple.

On one hand, we have those who deny cli­mate change is a prob­lem. Some be­lieve it is a hoax, while oth­ers merely don’t grasp the grav­ity of the sit­u­a­tion. This per­spec­tive is mis­in­formed.

On the other hand, there are some who be­lieve cli­mate change is a prob­lem be­yond their abil­i­ties to im­pact. They be­lieve that, as mere in­di­vid­u­als, there is not a sin­gle thing they can do that could have a mean­ing­ful ef­fect to­ward re­duc­ing car­bon emis­sions. This per­spec­tive is equally mis­in­formed.

In re­al­ity, the cli­mate prob­lem is huge. It will re­sult in mas­sive habi­tat losses for hu­man life and wildlife. In all like­li­hood, hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple will lose the abil­ity to farm their land, ei­ther from drought, floods, lost soil fer­til­ity or wild­fires.

Side Note: If you want to learn more about hu­man mi­gra­tion in the 21st cen­tury, I highly rec­om­mend the doc­u­men­tary Climate Refugees.

The point of this ar­ti­cle is not to con­vince you that cli­mate change is a real prob­lem that has real so­lu­tions. At this point, I don’t need to tell you that the cli­mate prob­lem is ac­tively be­ing solved by some of the most coura­geous, in­flu­en­tial, in­tel­li­gent minds in the world. There are so­lu­tions out there that are hav­ing a huge im­pact, but peo­ple don’t have a straight­for­ward way to dis­cover them.

The prob­lem I want to solve is this: there is no sin­gle met­ric or dash­board to see the progress of cli­mate change and its so­lu­tions.

What’s the Pitch?

As I am sure you fig­ured out from the ti­tle, I want to make a progress bar for cli­mate change. A sin­gle place peo­ple can go to see where we, as a planet and as a species, stand. Func­tion­ally, I want to repli­cate how we can view fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s debt in real time, but for cli­mate change.

I’ve con­versed with a friend of mine, Anyll Markevich, who knows much more about cli­mate is­sues than I do. While we would ob­vi­ously need mul­ti­ple rounds of peer re­view be­fore we can put any­thing of sub­stance out, Anyll has rec­om­mended I start my re­search in a cou­ple spe­cific ar­eas.

Planetary Boundaries

There ex­ist some pro­jects and tools that hold a sim­i­lar goal as the cli­mate change progress bar. The clos­est I could find was the Planetary Boundaries pro­ject.

When hav­ing an ar­gu­ment with some­one, there are some lines you just can­not cross. Some lines are un­avoid­able. God­win’s law states that “as an on­line dis­cus­sion grows longer, the prob­a­bil­ity of a com­par­i­son to Hitler ap­proaches 1.” While com­par­ing your ar­gu­men­ta­tive op­po­nent to a geno­ci­dal dic­ta­tor is al­most never nec­es­sary or use­ful, the line gets crossed even­tu­ally.

The plan­et’s ecosys­tem is sim­i­lar. There are cer­tain eco­log­i­cal lines that can­not not be crossed, like hav­ing more than 10 ex­tinc­tions per mil­lion species in a year, with­out sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on global eco­log­i­cal health. The planet can han­dle a cer­tain amount of car­bon diox­ide in the air, but it can­not han­dle more than 350 parts per mil­lion with­out sig­nif­i­cant dam­age oc­cur­ring. At the time of writ­ing, $CO_2$ is cur­rently at 418 ppm.

The above graph shows where the planet is on sev­eral plan­e­tary bound­aries. As you can see, we’ve ex­ceeded most of them.

While plan­e­tary bound­aries are a great way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing where we are on a bunch of en­vi­ron­men­tal met­rics, it falls short of our goal in a few key ways. For one, it does­n’t spe­cial­ize in cli­mate change. While it does show cur­rent car­bon diox­ide lev­els, it does­n’t in­clude any other green­house gases, or how deepy they are ef­fect­ing global tem­per­a­tures. Fi­nally, it is only up­dated an­nu­ally. The Climate Change Progress Bar’s key trait is that it is real-time, so peo­ple can see how we stand in the cli­mate bat­tle right now.

Possible Data Sources

This is some­thing I need to speak to more cli­mate ex­perts on. How­ever, at the bare min­i­mum there are a few el­e­ments our tech­nol­ogy can look at.

Real Time Carbon Data

Anyll sug­gested I look into the Carbon Monitor, a real-time car­bon emis­sions’ dataset. Since it does­n’t look like their API is ac­ces­si­ble, but their code is, it looks like we can just run in on our in­fra­struc­ture. I need to look into the tech­ni­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails a bit more, but ini­tial prospects are good.

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

NDVI is an in­dus­try-stan­dard way of mea­sur­ing the pho­to­syn­thetic pro­duc­tiv­ity of plants around the globe. It works by ap­ply­ing some sim­ple math on two bands of satel­lite im­agery, both of which are widely avail­able. The com­par­a­tive low com­pu­ta­tional cost of get­ting the NDVI of an area is a boon for our real-time goals. It seems like its main draw­back is that it does­n’t give us many met­rics on bio­di­ver­sity.

Getting Started

We want to get started on an MVP as quickly as pos­si­ble. The rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity of the NVDI gives us a great way to set up and test a real-time data pro­cess­ing pipeline. We aim to in­clude other met­rics, like pop­u­la­tion growth and clean in­vest­ing, but we want to pre­pare a pipeline first.

Feedback

This post, as well as all other posts re­lated to this pro­ject, ex­ist to serve two pur­poses:

1. Bookkeeping and white­board­ing de­vice.
2. To get feed­back on every stage of the process.

In other words, I want to hear from you! If you have any ideas to how we can make the Climate Change Progress bar bet­ter, let us know by email­ing feed­back@eli­jah­pot­ter.dev If there are bet­ter met­rics we should be in­clud­ing in our in­dex, tell us!