Government carbon dioxide emissions between May 2010 and May 2011 amounted to 646,231 tonnes, which is 13.8% less than the previous year. This is what that looks like:

The actual volume of carbon dioxide gas emitted by the UK Government in 2010/11 (red volume). The saving on 2009/10 - the gas that didn't enter the atmosphere - is shown as the dashed volume. The target is shown as a red band.

Carbon Visuals has produced a set of high-resolution Google Earth images to illustrate the data. Concrete visualisations like these give some viewers a better feel for the scale of the emissions and savings than a table alone can. They are available from Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution License (credit: Carbon Visuals). Click the images to see higher resolution versions in Flickr. See the Government press release here: www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn11_059/pn11_059.aspx.

To view these volumes in Google Earth, download the .kmz files:

• Government CO2
• Departments CO2

The view from Pall Mall, looking down Waterloo Place.

The view from Buckingham Palace

The view from inside the volume. The area of the base is 66 hectares (163 acres) and the height of the red volume is 525 metres.

Actual volumes of emissions (and targets and savings) from Government Departments. The columns are 175 metres wide. The area of the base of each column is 3 hectares (7.6 acres). The heights of the red volumes range from 2,846 metres (Dept. of Work and Pensions) to 17 metres (Dept. of Energy and Climate Change).

Left to right: Department of Work and Pensions; Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs; Ministry of Justice; Ministry of Defence; Home Office; Department for Transport; Department for Communities and Local Government; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Department of Health; Department for Education; Cabinet Office; UK Statistics Authority; Her Majesty's Treasury; Department for International Development; Department for Culture Media and Sport; Department of Energy and Climate Change

View from Tottenham Court Road

Left to right: Ministry of Justice; Ministry of Defence; Home Office; Department for Transport; Department for Communities and Local Government; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Department of Health; Department for Education; Cabinet Office; UK Statistics Authority

View from Westminster Square

Left to right: Department for Communities and Local Government; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department

Left to right: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Left to right: Ministry of Defence; Home Office; Department for Transport; Department for Communities and Local Government; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Left to right: Left to right: Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Department of Health; Department for Education; Cabinet Office; UK Statistics Authority

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office did well to reduce its emissions by over 18% but it didn't meet its target reduction of nearly 29%

Left to right: Cabinet Office; UK Statistics Authority; Her Majesty's Treasury; Department for International Development; Department for Culture Media and Sport

Left to right: Her Majesty's Treasury; Department for International Development; Department for Culture Media and Sport; Department of Energy and Climate Change

Left to right: Department of Work and Pensions; Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs; Ministry of Justice; Ministry of Defence; Home Office; Department for Transport; Department for Communities and Local Government; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Law Officers' Department; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Department of Health; Department for Education; Cabinet Office; UK Statistics Authority; Her Majesty's Treasury; Department for International Development; Department for Culture Media and Sport; Department of Energy and Climate Change

Aerial view looking South East from above Westminster

Volume visualisation is not just for gas. Carbon Visuals has developed a range of techniques for helping people relate to data.

We've done another visualisation for the BBC One Planet programme. This time it was for a special programme dedicated to the Deepwater Horizon spill. They wanted a picture that could give a sense of scale for the amount of oil. Adam has already given that some thought when he tried to get a sense of the flow rate see: How much oil is gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig? And what does that mean? and BP's Deepwater Horizon - oil animation (but see also his note about how impoverished statistical thinking can be: Memories of Piper Alpha).

The National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group estimates that 4.9 million barrels of oil (± 10%) spilled from Deepwater Horizon. Few of us have a good sense of how much that is. Because of the nature of oil - because it is hydrophobic and affects environments by coating surfaces - it makes more sense to think of oil in terms of area rather than volume. We chose to imagine it coating an area to a depth of 1 mm because that feels like a thickness we can relate to. It's thick enough to kill most living things it coated (we assume). More importantly, we can imagine walking through a puddle 1 mm thick - it would be slippery and you'd make schlopp sclopp noises as you walked. So how big would a puddle 1 mm thick containing 4.9 million barrels of oil be? 

At 1mm thick, 4.9 million barrels would coat an area of 779 square km (192 thousand acres). It would form a ‘puddle’ 31.5 km across. This is about:

• Half the area of Greater London
• 13 x the area of Manhattan, NY
• A quarter of the area of Rhode Island

4.9 million barrels of oil as a 1mm thick puddle over London

For those who know the area, it stretches from Cockfosters in the North to Croydon in the South and from Southall in the West to Barking in the East.

Note: the picture is not the size of the Deepwater Horizon slick, which covered a much larger area but was thinner than 1 mm on average. For a sense of scale of the slick see: If it were my home. 

As a volume, 4.9 million barrels is 779 thousand cubic metres, which is equivalent to:

• A cube 92 metres high (pictured)
• 312 Olympic swimming pools
• 2.6 x the vol. of the UN Secretariat Building (Tower) NY

4.9 million barrels of oil would fill a cube 92 metres tall.

The PDF mentioned in the BBC One Planet programme is here:

Click here to download:

4.9millionBarrels.pdf (3.79 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

4.9millionBarrels.pdf (3.79 MB)

The One Planet radio programme on the BBC's World Service came to Carbon Visuals with simple question: "what does our carbon footprint look like?" Hear the show (first broadcast on Thursday 8 April 2010 at 09:30 GMT / 10:30 BST) by visiting the One Planet website.

One Planet carefully documents the impact the making of the programme has on the atmosphere. It turns out that their carbon footprint is about 34.9 tonnes per year. But what does that mean? Measuring carbon dioxide in terms of mass (tonnes) makes sense from an accounting point of view but doesn't give us a sense of scale we can relate to. We at Carbon Visuals came up with a variety of alternative ways of representing One Planet's footprint. Some use our on-line tools: the Carbon Widget, which allows anyone to place a beautiful visualisation of carbon dioxide in their own web page and the Carbon Quilt, which offers a range of beautiful and informative visualisations.

Most people think of mass in terms of weight - the force with which heavy things push downwards - but that doesn't really work with gases. Gases are buoyant - they float supported by the air itself - so it doesn't 'feel' like they push down at all. For an intuitive sense of scale we at Carbon Visuals generally prefer to represent quantities of gas in terms of volume - the space gas occupies. But there are different ways of representing volumes. The one to choose depends on the story you want to tell and who you want to tell it to. The aim is to help your viewers to make the quantity meaningful for themselves, which means giving them something they can relate to personally. 

A simple way to represent a volume is with a sphere. This is what 34.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide gas looks like as a sphere:

BBC One Planet's annual emissions as a sphere (actual volume of gas)

Spheres are quite good for representing single quantities but less good for comparisons because comparing volumes by eye is something few of us are any good at - even with a handy Routemaster bus to provide a sense of scale. On the other hand, we are much better at 'counting' by eye, so it is often good to break a volume up into standard sized units.

BBC One Planet's annual emissions as a pile of one-tonne cubes (actual volume of gas)

In the picture above, One Planet's carbon footprint is represented as a pile of one-tonne cubes. It turns out that one tonne of carbon dioxide would fill a cube 8.12 metres high. But comparison is even easier if, as well as using standard sized units we vary the size of the volume in just one dimension. We could, for instance, easily compare the carbon footprint of two shows by representing them as different sized 'towers' with equal base areas. In the picture above, One Planet's footprint is represented as a tower of 10 tonne cubes. 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide would fill a cube 17.5 metres high.

BBC One Planet's annual emissions as a tower of 10-tonne cubes (actual volume of gas)

Giving the viewer a way to relate to the volume is very important. Despite being an internationally established standard of comparison, a Routemaster bus isn't quite up to the task. We need something of comprable size that viewers have seen before. Preferably it will be something in viewers' own environment that they can relate to on a physical level because they know what it's like to share space with such an object. For Londoners, Nelson's Column works well in this instance:

BBC One Planet's annual emissions as a tower of 10-tonne cubes (actual volume of gas)

Nelson's Column is well known around the world, so it can also help people who haven't been to London to relate to the volume. But there are still many options. Choosing the right one depends on the context of the visualisation. For some audiences, it's most useful to keep things as simple as possible, as above.  But we could also choose to show more of the surrounding area:

BBC One Planet's annual emissions as a tower of 10-tonne cubes (actual volume of gas)

Or we could embed the volume in an actual photograph, which gives many more ways for viewers to put themselves in the space and relate to the volume:

BBC One Planet's annual emissions (actual volume of gas). The photograph we used was by Christian Bortes. 

In many instances, an annual footprint is just to big to provide insight. Breaking it up into smaller units can help. One Planet for instance could visualise their footprint show by show with the Carbon Widget. The widget makes visualisation easy - all you have to do put a number in, give the picture a title and description and the widget generates a few lines of code that you can copy and paste into your webpage.

We decided to break One Planet's footprint into units of time. If the programme is responsible for 34.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, this is equivalent to an average of 96 kg every day:

BBC One Planet's daily emissions (actual volume of gas)

We can break this down even more and ask how much does BBC One Planet emit every second?

Emissions from BBC One Planet every second! (Actual volume of gas)

It turns out that One Planet accounts for just over one-billionth of the World's total annual emissions of carbon dioxide. As a patch of the 'Carbon Quilt' the One Planet footprint looks like this:

Screengrab from the Carbon Quilt site 

So the simple question, 'what does our carbon footprint look like?' has many possible answers. Investigate more carbon footprints and even see what your own looks like on the Carbon Quilt site: www.carbonquilt.org.

Discovering that CO₂ is vital to life on Earth can cause serious confusion. A recent comment about the Carbon Quilt video is typical:

"pollution isnt good but life requires co2 so this is bullshit."

One response is to point out that:  

"water is vital to life also, but that's little comfort when you are drowning."

However, there is an underlying problem deeper than the point addressed in this glib response. It isn't a problem of numeracy like that discussed in the previous post nor a problem of scientific understanding. Rather it is a problem of binary categories. Like most political debates, climate change is discussed in moral terms and actions and 'actors' (including carbon dioxide itself) are divided into 'good' and 'bad' or 'hero' and 'villain'.

Discovering that plants would die without carbon dioxide and that the greenhouse effect is a 'good' thing because it stops the Earth from freezing is difficult to reconcile with the idea that carbon emissions are a 'bad' thing. How can something 'good' be described as a pollutant? Pollution is by definition bad. If the function of debate is understood to be determining the moral status of actions and actors, this is a problem. 

The 'green' side of the debate carries much of the blame for the degeneration of discourse on climate change. Greens have been discussing the environment in moral terms for decades which has had the effect that 'understanding' the environment for many people amounts to no more than deciding what is good or bad: cars - bad; bikes - good; nuclear power - bad; carbon dioxide - bad; organic farming - good; etc. These moral categories are a serious obstacle to understanding and make productive debate almost impossible. Both green rhetoric and the rhetoric of climate change skeptics makes it very difficult to discuss any of the subtle and complex aspects of climate change.

How NOT to do it

This video, which is featured on a climate change skeptic website (www.co2science.org) comes to the conclusion that carbon dioxide is the "breath of life" and for Al Gore or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the United States Government to suggest otherwise is "an affront to all logic and a complete disavowal of reality".

The trouble is, nobody - least of all Al Gore, the IPCC and the US Government - has ever suggested that carbon dioxide isn't important to life. In fact, it is the acknowledged potency of carbon dioxide that is the problem. Nevertheless, the rhetoric works because viewers expectations require carbon dioxide to be either a hero or a villain. (The heroic music also helps us to place CO₂ in the correct category.) 

Lessons for those involved in communicating facts about climate change:

• Challenge the intuitive idea that because CO₂ is vital to life, the more there is the better off we all are
• Remember that any and all 'facts' are understood in relation to binary moral categories
• Before facts can 'speak for themselves' we have to disrupt the binary categories in which they are understood
• Avoid moralising
• If you must use moral arguments, ensure it is human actions that carry moral weight - not 'things' (such as CO₂, power stations or even people) 

There is an increasingly common misconception we should be wary of:

"Carbon dioxide is a 'trace gas' so there's (practically) nothing to worry about"

You will see an argument like this in many places where climate change is debated. Making the facts as clear as possible (as we try to do at Carbon Visuals) can compound the problem. For many people, realising how small a number like 388 parts per million (the current concentration of CO₂) really is has the effect of making the problem itself seem small. Numerate people see this the other way round:

"It is because there is so little carbon dioxide that it is a problem because: a) it's potent stuff, b) it doesn't take much for human activity to have a significant impact on the quantity."

Some of our images can be read in a numerate way or an innumerate way that totally reverses the conclusion the viewer comes to. Everybody communicating facts about climate change should be aware of this effect and ready to explicitly articulate the numerate reading. Here are two examples:

Example 1: 385 parts per million

This picture above (and detail from it) represents carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Air is a mixture of gases. In this picture, air molecules are represented as white dots (25,488 of them). Their separation corresponds to the average separation of air molecules at sea level (about 11 molecule diameters).

The blue-circled dots are 'natural' carbon dioxide. In 1750, 280 out of every million air molecules were carbon dioxide. This proportion is represented by the blue circled dots. It is a small number compared to the other molecules that make up the air (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) which shows what potent stuff carbon dioxide is. Without these blue dots the world would freeze and all plants would die.

The red-circled dots are carbon dioxide molecules that we have added to the air. In 2008, 385 of every 1 million air molecules was carbon dioxide. The extra carbon dioxide molecules that we humans have added are shown as red-circled dots. Because carbon dioxide is so potent, it doesn't take much to have a significant impact.

Example 2: All the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

If you brought it all together, the World's carbon dioxide would fill a cube 116.92 km high. When this picture was made (in 2007) there was 2,989 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The picture shows the volume this amount of the gas would occupy at sea-level pressure and temperature. The blue section is the 'natural' carbon dioxide - the quantity that the Earth has maintained for millions of years. It is vital for all life on Earth. The red section of the cube is the carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere (and is still there) since industrialisation began in about 1800.

The picture reveals how human activity can have a dramatic effect on climate. This relatively small amount of gas makes a huge difference to global temperatures. Increasing the amount will have a significant impact.

How NOT to do it (#1)

The following video by Elisa Pardo is an example of a missed opportunity. Using grains of rice to represent air molecules is a very neat way to provide a sense of scale. 

Unfortunately Elisa Pardo has got her facts wrong. Anthropogenic CO₂ accounts for about 108 ppmv (28% of the current total) not 15 ppmv (4% of current total). This mistake not withstanding, Elisa Pardo's presentation of facts can be interpreted in a numerate or innumerate manner. Unfortunately, Pardo's conclusion is the innumerate one. She concludes (in effect):

'See? Nothing to worry about - look at how small this is'.

Her neat presentation actually points to the opposite conclusion:

'These few red grains of rice make a huge difference to our climate, and we add new ones at our peril'.

How NOT to do it (#2)

This video makes exactly the same innumerate mistake in interpretation and also makes numerical errors about the the proportion of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

Conclusion

A sense of scale is vitally important, but in communicating a sense of scale we need to be aware of the innumerate conclusions that most viewers will jump to. We need to state explicitly that it is because the numbers are small that the problem is big.

Augmented Reality used to be expensive to do but now the essential components of an AR system are routinely built into consumer electronics. Smart phones have GPS, compasses and accelerometers and AR is accessible to every developer, which is marvellous. There are already some inspiring applications such as Acrossair’s Nearest Tube. And Nearest Tube is surprisingly nice to use, by the way – AR is no longer just for geeks. Here’s a nice collection of AR videos: http://bit.ly/AR-vids.

But AR’s essential components can be used for more than merely augmenting reality (for an account of this see here: http://bit.ly/creL0u). One of the most exciting opportunities for AR comes from turning it on its head. Instead of adding a layer of data to the real world, use the real world itself as a 'canvas' for data. We at Carbon Visuals have taken to calling this 'reality augmented data' or RAD.

A simple example of RAD in action is www.carbonquilt.org. We take a datum such as a country’s per-capita carbon dioxide emissions and display it as an actual volume on a user’s own street, so he or she can relate to it physically and personally. Users have rich relationship with the buildings and geography of their neighbourhood and Carbon Quilt makes this is available to them for making sense of abstract statistics (literally making sense of them). We are currently working on an iPhone app. that makes the connection even stronger.

A basic illustration of RAD. Central Bedfordshire Council emitted 33,702 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2008/9 (not including social housing stock). The council aims to reduce that figure by 60% by 2020. The illustration shows the actual size of this reduction in terms of volume of gas. Embedding the illustration in a map of Bedford (the nearest town) gives the unweildy volume a familiar context. Viewers' rich, embodied experience of Bedford helps turn the statistic into something personally meaningful.

Here’s the thing about AR: humans are already pretty good at making sense of the real world, but we are still rubbish at making sense of information such as statistics. It is often useful to add a layer of data to the real world, as Nearest Tube demonstrates. Nevertheless, the world is infinitely richer than any layer of data we could add to it. Data, on the other hand, is impoverished and our access to it clumsy. RAD lets us ‘borrow’ the world itself to provide a better interface with data.

This idea of borrowing aspects of world itself to visualise abstract data is not new in scientific visualisation. Philip Robertson mapped it out explicitly in an account of what called the ‘natural scene paradigm’ (Robertson, Philip K. 1991 May, ‘A Methodology For Choosing Data Representations’, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, pp 56 67, p 59). But up to now, scientific visualisation has aimed only to make data look like the world (e.g. make an undulating iso-surface look like a mountain, because we are good at looking at mountains and working out what we are looking at with a single glance). RAD goes much further in embedding data in the world itself.

Billions of years of programming (i.e. evolution) have given us a remarkable interface with the real world, much more powerful than any data interface we’ve built. With RAD, our rich experience of the world is co-opted to help us engage with data. This means our relationship with data could be as rich as our engagement with the real world (potentially).

Here's CarbonQuilt's contribution to Blog Action Day. In December the countries of the World will meet at the COP 15 conference in Copenhagen to agree a new framework for reducing carbon emissions. This video illustrates the problem:

The video shows the actual volume of emissions in real-time. If all the World's carbon dioxide emissions emerged at one place, this is what it would look like.

What is clear is that the United States and China are crucial to the success of the conference. Most of the other emissions are accounted for by the other G20 countries, which means that the future of the whole World will be determined by a handful of countries, and mostly by the US and China. The biggest polluters can name their terms. Poorer countries, which in many cases are those with most to lose, have little bargain with. Given their bargaining position, it will surprise no-one if the US emerges with a remarkably generous deal.

Two bubble maps show the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by different countries. Left - cumulative emissions since 1751; right - emissions in 2006. The two diagrams are to scale. The colours of the circles indicate membership of the G20.

Interactive versions of these charts are available here:

http://carbonquilt.org/gallery/interactive

China is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. In 2006, China's emissions accounted for 20% of the world's emissions while the United States was responsible for 19%. But China's emissions are high because they have a large population. In 2006, each Chinese person contributed 13 kg of carbon dioxide per day - about the same as the World average. In comparison, each US citizen contributed 52 kg per day, over 4 times more than the World average. In other words, each American has the same impact as four Chinese people. Each UK citizen emits 28 kg per day, about half of the US rate.

China, India and other developing countries argue that they should be allowed to develop their economies with the same access to cheap energy that other countries have enjoyed over the past 200 years. The US and Europe, they argue, should bear the brunt of effort to limit carbon emissions because it is they who have caused the problem in the first place. Negotiations then have 3 major axes: historical emissions, current emissions, and current emissions per capita.

Should the negotiations at COP15 be based on historical emissions or on current emissions? The diagram above gives an indication of the scale of responsibility. Nevertheless, it is current emissions that have to be reduced. Unless the agreement can make a distinction between the costs of mitigation and the costs of emissions reduction, it is the diminutive chart on the right that will be the focus of discussions. Should national emissions or per capita emissions form the basis of the negotiations? The US will ensure it is the former.

Data source: CDIAC, doi10.3334/CDIAC/00001

Coming soon - cube and sphere visualisations for the Carbon Quilt site. Cubes are a nice, direct way of viewing any volume of carbon dioxide. They don't provide the same insight into the share of the global emisissions that patches of quilt do but they give a good sense of scale.