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16 May 2007
Climate Change isn't about saving the planet
Posted by Rob Styles at May 16, 2007 10:13 AM
It's about saving ourselves.
This is the message that Gavin Starks is keynoting on at XTech. Climate Change is a phrase that hides the truth of the situation.
The Himalyan glaciers feed three of the world's major river systems, sustaining 750 million people. If these melt we're not talking about warmer weather - this is a Mass Extinction Event.
So Gavin's mission is to make the message clearer and to help people understand how they can avoid mass extinction; actually no that's not quite accurate. His mission is to help people
AVOID MASS EXTINCTION !
There, was that clear enough? Gavin is an enigmatic speaker, with a mix of images and statistical data he gives the usual doom and gloom story, using stronger language but the end result is more uplifting than the usual. He's doing stuff about this and wants to help other people do something too.
It's clear to Gavin that if we're talking about avoiding mass extinction then we shouldn't be concerned about IPR, Copyright or other barriers to sharing. We need to share everything we have, information, expertise, tools, data - everything.
So, today is launch day for AMEE (the Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine, http://www.dgen.net/amee) which is a carbon calculator based on peer-reviewed open data. Importantly it also provides an API and has a peer review process to accept contributions of new data.
Accepting new data, and making the data they have accessible via a simple API makes them more transparent, accountable and open than other similar efforts have been and that is a good thing.
Great talk, great tool - take a look at it.
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