New York City's greenhouse gas emissions as one-ton spheres of carbon dioxide gas
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- In 2010 New York City added 54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (equivalent) to the atmosphere, but that number means little to most people because few of us have a sense of scale for atmospheric pollution.
www.realworldv...
Carbon Visuals (precursor to Real World Visuals www.realworldvi...) and Environmental Defense Fund (www.edf.org/cli...) wanted to make those emissions feel a bit more real - the total emissions and the rate of emission. Designed to engage the 'person on the street', this version is exploratory and still work in progress. Mayor Bloomberg's office has not been involved in the creation or dissemination of this video.
NYC carbon footprint:
54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second
At standard pressure and 59 °F a metric ton of carbon dioxide gas would fill a sphere 33 feet across (density of CO₂ = 1.87 kg/m³: bit.ly/CO2_data.... If this is how New York's emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds.
Emissions in 2010 were 12% less than 2005 emissions. The City of New York is on track to reduce emissions by 30% by 2017 - an ambitious target.
For a set of stills from this movie, see: www.flickr.com/...
For more information see:
www.realworldv...
Co-director: Chris Rabét (www.chrisrabet....)
This is great work... I think visualization has a much bigger impact than big numbers.
Would really love to see a Worldwide visualization... with the 'thin blue line' represented as well... I don't think people understand how thin the atmosphere really is, when I tell people if they imagine the Earth was a basketball and the atmosphere is about the thickness of a layer of paint on the basketball they don't believe me.
I think this is really important work to give a visual context to scientific data that is really incomprehensible. And I love the sound track! Can't wait for more from this project. Really fantastic. Thank you!
I watched your animation of New York's green house gas emissions about a year ago and it got me thinking about other possibly more viral ways to visualize it.
I recently read that an average car generates about 1 pound of CO2 per mile, and I started thinking of what that could look like if that weight was instead represented by other types of waste and distributed where it is being generated instead of in a single pile like the video above. It is also hard to relate to a sphere representing the size of 1 ton of CO2, since CO2 is invisible and a lot of people don't even know how many pounds make a ton.
I think that it is because CO2 is invisible that many people do not realize the quantity of it being produced by our fossil fuel use. What if instead of showing the CO2 volume as 1 ton spheres building up, it is instead represented with the weight of other waste that we are familiar with? Since the CO2 waste is not hauled away like other wastes, what would an animation of the equivalent weight of other wastes look like piling up over time? After thinking about it for a while, I believe that it would be pretty dramatic!
So here are some ideas for viral video animations of CO2 emissions. I do not have the software or skills to do an animation of this myself, so I decided to tell you and see if you would like to run with it.
My first idea was to have sewage spilling out of tailpipes and falling from buildings, with puddles forming and pedestrians getting splashed as the traffic goes through the puddles and having it dump down onto people's heads from the buildings. Gross but effective and perhaps viral if done well. However, a pound of liquid is only is only 2 cups of volume and so it may actually take a while for it to accumulate enough to be dramatic.
Another idea would be to have the equivalent weight of fast food packaging being tossed out of the cars as they drive along and also fluttering down from the buildings, building up in the streets and getting hit and run over by the traffic causing a huge mess. The weight of a fast food meal bag and packaging is less than 2 ounces, so that would be 8 to 10 bags per mile or a bag every 1 to 2 blocks per car! Multiply that by the hundreds of cars per minute in a busy location like New York Times Square and the build up would be quick indeed. New York Times Square is a good location to use because most people have seen it and are familiar with it, it has a lot of traffic, and the buildings around it also use a lot of energy. So lots of CO2 and lots of equivalent weight of waste!
I know that awareness is beginning to happen (but not fast enough), but because CO2 is invisible I really think many people don't think of it like they do other waste/trash. If trash or sewage is allowed to pile up, it quickly becomes a huge and visible problem. If people started thinking of CO2 emissions the same way, and realized that it too is a waste product but one that has been allowed to "pile up" like uncollected trash or an overflowing toilet maybe that would get people's attention! And the video would go viral....
So, what do you think?
One of the reasons we chose to show the volume as a pile of individual spheres rather than as one big volume is that the human eye is not very good at judging volume, but is good at judging numbers of things. We accounted for the space in-between the spheres in the calculation. When you pack spheres randomly it turns out that the spheres themselves take up 64% of the space - this is the 'packing density' - so 36% is space between. As one giant sphere, NYC's footprint would be 2.37 miles across.
@Steve Hoge, I co directed this video and created the vfx. The model of the city is accurate including the buildings, to a reasonable accuracy based on the scales needed.
Any thoughts of doing a shorter version (90 sec or so), with less of the initial balloons sequence? To me, the power of the visual is in the piles (very impactful); but it takes a bit long to get there.
Your calculations are pretty good, but your geography is a bit off. The basis of our calculation is discussed on the Carbon Visuals web page. The total volume of the pile (including the spaces between the spheres) is 45,412,474,933 m3. The pile is somewhere between a cone (h=r= 3,513m) & a hemisphere (r=2,789m). It stretches from the edge of Brooklyn to somewhere around 52nd St. It doesn't get close to North Bergen.
Well done! Are there other visual methods which will help educate people? Hope there are many! Thank you for this one!
great imagery, but misconceived -- NYC has the smallest carbon footprint per capita in the US, less than half the national average (because of mass transit and walkability). Check out David Owen's book "Green Metropolis" for the data.
On the other hand, showing 20 lbs of CO2 tumbling out of a car in the suburbs, for each gallon of gas (you get about 20 lbs of CO2 from 6 lbs of gasoline, as the O2 binds with the carbon) -- that would be great, if you could make that video.
This is mad effective for visualising pollution in NYC.
#gplus
Congrats! Amazing data visualization!!
Awesome video. Thank you.
The idea is that the video will support the great work NYC is doing to reduce its already small (by US standards) footprint. We would like to do something similar for other cities, e.g. LA (more cars but stronger regulations).
We do have plans for a video showing the actual volume of carbon dioxide emerging from moving vehicles. In the mean-time, have you seen what the CO2 from a gallon of gas looks like? There's a picture on the CarbonVisuals website: Our Work / USA specific image set
I think people are completely missing the point when trying to do the math or judge geography. The volume of carbon is happening everywhere all over the world. More in some places and less in others, but it's rapidly growing and it's all spreading through the atmosphere. Why is this even an argument? Why do people miss the point that it's happening and it doesn't stop happening? You can choose to ignore it or deny it all you want but your children's children wont.
If it were up to me we would use only SI units, but the target audience for this film thinks and feels in imperial units. The idea is to use people's actual experience of the world to help make sense of otherwise abstract data, so we use anything that helps our audience relate to the numbers physically. In the US CO2 is (mostly) accounted for in tonnes (known in the US as metric tons) so that is why we mix imperial and metric.
1.87 kg/m3 is the *density* not pressure!
Surely there is a much larger message that makes a debate about units insignificant? Regardless of any minor discrepancy on units etc., it is undoubtedly evident that large cities, of which New York is but one, are a major source of CO2 emissions. I thank CarbonVisuals for this visualisation to put some visual perspective on this topic, as numbers mean little to most. Hopefully we can all, regardless of where we live in the world, work to reduce these emissions!
To Bill Orme's point, the constant sound of car (horn blaring) creates dissonance between the animation and the fact that 75% of NYC's CO2 emmisions come from buildings, not cars. It may have been better to have the bubbles emitting from the rooftop exhausts of the buildings and settling down (as CO2 does) onto the city, with some sort or big HVAC system/fan sound in the background.
true but the problem is that we are globaly reducing the amount of plants every day ( mainly massive deforisting ) its more food than plants will need...
1) Great idea, but how about re-doing it visually as the CO2 version of the Thanksgiving parade? That is, with the emissions bubbles floating in file far above 7th avenue ...
2) A bit lost visually is the important point that NYC (and especially Manhattan) emissions are proportionally more from buildings than cars - opposite the pattern almost everywhere else
I'm more impressed at the detail of the rendering. Gases are very low in density, so of course one full year's emission will take up a huge space.
Yes we need more hybrid cars but in a price range that people working at Wal-Mart can aford them!!!
Great visualisation although it has some disturbing implications
I wonder how much CO2 was produced for the making of this video...
Impressive. You should try to apply this viz to other cities.
How was the cityscape modeled? Are only the landmarks accurate or all the buildings?
awesome
Das ist das bis abstand geilste Video darüber, wie schlimm Co2 sich ausbreitet wenn es in nur einer stunde in die Luft gelangt und sich dort dann ablagert. Respekt und geil animiert.
Good visuals!
I liked it.. do more, keep up the good work.
mY WHOLE CLASS WATCHED THIS VIDEO
Until the cost of housing there comes down and that same housing is updated to be significantly more energy efficient, nothing, NO THING will change.
Those are simple facts to grasp.
could you do one of these for the Alberta Tar Sands?
Nice job guys
I would like to figure the percentage of the planet's total emissions, NYC's 54 million tons a day, represents. I recall a number of 90 million tons a day, for total world pollution. So 90 X 365 days, that's 32,850 million tons for a year. Dividing, I get 0.00164% or thereabouts. Can this be right? Mistake? Maybe wrong inputs.
frankly speaking NY is not that bad if you consider the population...... its subway system help reducing lots of greenhouse gas.
Mayor Bloomberg re-imagines New York as a giant ball pit? I like where he's going with this!
Which programm did u use ?
frankly speaking NY is not that bad if you consider the population...... its subway system help reducing lots of CO2.
I would like to figure the percentage of the planet's total emissions, NYC's 54 million tons a day, represents. I recall a number of 90 million tons a day, for total world pollution. So 90 X 365 days, that's 32,850 million tons for a year. Dividing, I get 0.00164% or thereabouts. Can this be right? Mistake? Maybe wrong inputs. But when I test for population: 8 million Divided by 7 billion, I get 0.00114% as NYC percent of world population.
Come on! CO2 is plant food. I'd be more concerned with CO emissions.
is this all 5 boroughs or just manhatten?
Sorry, but I do not get any sense this is intended to "support the great work NYC is doing to reduce it's already small footprint." If anything, I got the exact opposite from the ...'s after each Time Span, the complete silence during the display of one year's worth of emissions, the end credit to an "environment defense fund", etc. It's still a compelling concept, but if the intent is to commend NYC then that was missed pretty completely.
Se a poluição fosse visível, vejam como ficaria NY após 1 ano.
E teríamos algo parecido ou até pior nas metrópoles do Brasil!!! #Preocupante
How do buildings create C02 emissions??
The CO2 is created by the fossil fuel combustion which generates the electricity used in the building.
@ 2:13 my office gets swallowed. i work in Jersey City
HI! I would like if you have any published academic journals on CO2 emmisions.
I'm writing a reasearch paper and I need numbers
And do people care? No they don't, sadly. I hope this raises attention, nice campaign.
Perfect ball pit!
How cool would it be to bounce down that balloon mountain? Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I wanna go to the top of the mountain and start rolling down. :3
who wanna climb mount CO2?
Sim city's new pollution data graph? Lol
Hello new york. Would you like some air?
Dec.4, 2012:
11 viewers of Fixed Noise don't believe what they saw here.
Despite all them librul biased facts 'n figures 'n stuff.