Google Earth Application Built to Show Climate Change Effects

On Monday, the Met Office Hadely Center, British Antarctic Survey, and the U.K. government released a Google Earth application that shows the effects of climate change over the next 100 years.

In their press release about the application, the Met Office Hadley Center describes the application as follows:

Once you click through to Google Earth, download the application and then download our layer, you will see a movie of global temperature changes for the next 100 years, produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre's climate model under a medium greenhouse gas emissions scenario. This shows where and how quickly we can expect the world to warm.

Too bad we can't adjust the greenhouse gas emission scenario and see how bad things could be under a high scenario. Check the differences between March 2008 above, and March 2058 below.

More information:

• The temperature change animation shows global temperature changes from 2000 to 2100 from the Met Office Hadley Centre’s Global Environmental Model Version 1 (HadGEM1).
  

• The world gets hotter (orange/red colours) as time goes by.
  

• Some regions warm more than others.
  

Illustrative information on the impacts of climate change for different regions is provided as pushpin "pop-ups" as the animation runs.

• Click the pushpins to find out more about the possible impacts of climate change around the world.
  

• In pop-ups with the Met Office logo, click our logo to find out about the impacts and come back to the Met Office website.

The initiative was launched by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google Zeitgeist conference on Monday.