Watch the World Breathe -- as we smoke it, some might say

Watch the World Breathe -- as we smoke it, some might say

Click image to view full-size screenshot.
But, note, it's just a still of a video page

David Bleja (aka StillWater), a student of Multimedia Design at Monash University, Australia, has created a Flash video presentation displaying the ongoing evolution via an interactive, multimedia map of the world estimating of each nation's worldwide carbon dioxide emission levels, birthrates and death rates using on base data from the USA's CIA and United Nations, all in purported "real-time", as it happens.

Going to BreathingEarth.Net and clicking to enter loads up an interactive, multimedia map and starts a counter recording global births, deaths and carbon dioxide emissions. Clicking on a country lists its base data as population and the numbers of minutes in which a person dies another is born and a kilotonne of carbon dioxide is emitted in that nation. (Unfortunately, because of StillWater's coding, the map only works in Internet Explorer and browsers that spoof IE, not Firefox.)

In about a minute thirty-four of one run, Stillwater's map guessed 120 folks bit the big one worldwide while 325 new lives lined up for the Show by PT Barnum, and another 49,000 tonnes of CO2 were spewed as support and exhaust of over 6.5 billion homo sapiens worldwide (see screenshot above).

The UN's World Population Prospects system forecasts over 9.1 billion people worldwide by 2050, adding some 2.5 billion people over 45 years. The entire cumulative world population built up to 1950 over 10,000 years was just over 2.5 billion.

As of the time of this post, Wikipedia describes World Population trends like this (click to enlarge):
And this (in millions):

Region	1750	1800	1850	1900	1950	1999	2050	2150
World	791	978	1,262	1,650	2,521	5,978	8,909	9,746

[Click arrows to view Wikipedia page]

(Ed. - Buy real estate, inland, maybe high ground.)

Vietnam's contribution to populating and polluting the Place, according to BreathingEarth (screenshot above) is summarized as over 84 million folks pumping out a measly 1000 tonnes of CO2 every 7.9 minutes, compared to the leaders, the G7 and BRIC blocks. But it does so while adding a new homo sapiens every 22 seconds for each one lost at one per minute -- ie, net growth of some 17 Viet homo sapiens every 10 minutes, almost 908,000 over the 525,600 minutes this year, edging a million per annum.

StillWater's recent works, including BreathingEarth, are listed at the StillWater Microcosm site.