Technology Slice Blog

Cop 16 Climate Summit - Today at the United Nations’ conference on climate change COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico Google.org introduced its latest philanthropic project, the Google Earth Engine— an analytics tool for earth scientists and conservationists especially. Google.org dubs their product “a planetary-scale platform for environmental data & analysis.” A product web page said: The Google Earth Engine brings together the world’s satellite imagery—trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years—and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine [a] massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the earth’s surface… The search leader also introduced the Google Earth Engine API— only available to approved partners at this time— to help researchers develop, access and run algorithms on the full Earth Engine data archive, using Google’s parallel processing platform. Cop 16 ...

Cop 16 In Cancun - The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP16 kicked off yesterday in Cancun, Mexico. Delegates from 192 nations are attending through December 10 hoping to determine a collective, international approach to slowing and preparing their countries for an increase in global temperatures. Conference goals— laid out at an opening address by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)— include the establishment of: commitments from countries to stop deforestation, a fund worth approximately $100 billion-a-year by 2013 to help poor people cope with climate change, and mechanisms that facilitate technology transfer between nations. Last year’s COP 15 conference in Copenhagen failed in its primary mission to draw countries into a legally binding agreement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. After the event, however, seventy countries signed the Copenhagen Accord, a voluntary political agreement to add...