For instance, Russia recently announced that it would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% on 1990 levels. In other words in by the year 2020 Russia’s yearly emissions (measured in tonnes of CO2) will be at 75% of what they were in 1990. This sounds good on paper since we generally assume that yearly emissions have increased since 1990 for all countries. But the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1991 led to massive fall in emissions, meaning that a 25% cut on Russia’s 1990 emissions levels actually equates to a 25.6% increase on Russia’s 2007 emissions levels. In other words, they’re allowing themselves to increase their pollution levels!

In order to help other people make sense of the emission targets being pledged by the various countries, over the last couple of days I’ve helped to develop a “target converter” for Sandbag, a non-profit climate change campaign.

It takes an emissions target and a baseline year for a given country and then calculates what the equivalent percentages are for all the other years for which emissions data is available for that country (data source is UNFCCC). So for instance, for Russia’s target of a 25% reduction on 1990 levels we get:

You can find the target converter at http://sandbag.org.uk/targetconverter.

One of their latest projects is a global parkour jam titled “One Giant Leap!”, designed to raise the public’s awareness of the importance of the upcoming conference. The jam is scheduled to take place on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 in over 30 countries simultaneously (see the map).

One of my tasks for this has been to create a pop-up widget which lets web users sign the One Giant Leap petition online. The requirement was for anyone to be able to embed this widget into their website. It had to stand out and couldn’t take up too much space on a page. After much fiddling with Javascript and CSS and with help from the other Sandbagger’s in terms of aesthetics a widget is finally born!

To embed the widget you simply need to add the following line to your webpage:

<script class="copenhagen_petition" src="http://sandbag.org.uk/embeddable_widgets/copenhagen_petition.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

This Javascript file first loads and initialises the jQuery library. It then generates the anchor link image you see in front of you. When you click the image a Thickbox pops up with the full sign-up form. The form is generated using the same PHP code used to generate the original petition form (albeit with minor style changes). Indeed, when you submit the widget form the server thinks you’ve just submitted the original petition form.