DISQUS

ST · 2 years ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=...

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

Kurt · 2 years ago

It should be pointed out that the article makes no mention of the CARMA's freely available API (http://www.carma.org/api). A big part of the CARMA initiative is to be a transparent provider of the data - and by making the API available, the carbon emissions data becomes actionable in a very real way.

Any individual or organization can now use the data as they wish to produce mash-ups, widgets, or other web services. Imagine the possibilities when you combine the CARMA data with lobbying records, government contracts and grants, member voting records from specific districts, or any other dataset - it's a powerful tool that has been made available.

This is a big part of the CARMA.org story, and it should receive more attention than it seems to be getting - go check it out!

Wolf · 2 years ago

This is clearly a great tool. When people get to see for themselves what their local plant is actually using to bring energy to their homes, they will begin to care. They'll then start talking to neighbors and friends about what's going on around them - creating a national discourse about the specifics behind power plants in the neighborhood is a necessary step in the evolution past the dinosaur industrial model and towards a society in alignment with nature rather than in conflict with it.

We should all applaud this effort and begin to request from our local plants that they do everything they can to switch to alternative energies immediately, using CARMA of course.

Wolf · 2 years ago

CARMA should give the user the ability to contact that plant with a message requesting that they expedite their transition to alternative energy. This is another tool to give people that will lead to action, not just awareness.