The green grass on the California flag is looking a bit disingenuous these days, as we’re in the middle of the worst drought in our history. Plus it’s likely this year will be one of the most intense fire seasons ever.
With this in mind, I made the Drought Flag of California:
Mark Lynas explains how China wrecked the Copenhagen summit (via The Guardian UK).
The Independent has another article about the massive floating trash “soup” in the Pacific.
It is truly staggering not only that such a large amount of trash is floating in the ocean, but that it has escaped discovery until now. It has to have been accumulating for decades.
Energy independence for Europe is going to be increasingly important geopolitically. The Russian South Stream pipeline was just approved in Bulgaria, which means the European Nabucco pipeline is economically unfeasible.
Russia has already used its control over the oil flowing into Europe as a political tool in Ukraine and Belarus, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t continue to do so in the future.
There’s a huge trash field floating in the North Pacific gyre (E on the map):
A segment on NPR about the same trash field noted that it does not show up on satellite photos because most plastic floats just under the surface of the water, where it is invisible unless you are close to the surface.
The New York times has a neat interactive campaign finance map. The candidates would do well to study the following informative maps too.
Maps of War has mostly silly FOX “news” style infographics, but History of Religion and Imperial History are both great.
You can map all sorts of indicators of globalization at Gapminder.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center has a map of the arctic isotherm and treeline. Watch this real estate — it’ll be booming unless the next president (see first map) ratifies Kyoto and turns our ship of state around.
And CIO has a purty map of who owns the internet.
Just when you thought the corporate & political world couldn’t get any more evil, it turns out even their attire is unenvironmental.
