Global Carbon Emissions on Google Maps

The World Resources Institute has used the Google Maps API to create an animated map which visualizes carbon dioxide emissions by country over the last 160 years.

The Changing Global Emissions Map uses scaled circular markers to show the carbon emissions of each country around the world. If you hover over the circles you can view the exact figure for each country, measured in millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide.

If you use the timeline beneath the map you can view an animation of the growth of carbon dioxide emissions over time. The timeline shows that a few western countries have managed to stabilize and actually manage to slightly reduce their emissions over the last few years. Unfortunately these reductions pale into insignificance compared to the huge growth in carbon emissions in the developing world.

Before the west gets too holier than thou about the developing world it is worth checking out the other map on the World Resources Institute website. This map shows the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of countries around the world. This map shows for example that while China's carbon emissions now dwarfs that of the USA its per capita emissions are still well under half of the per capita emissions of the United States.

Via: Visual Loop