Climate change number-crunching: New Web app charts pledges

You can more closely track progress against various carbon emissions reductions with a new interactive Web application that has been mashed up by the World Resources Institute. The application lets you display the pledges with different variables in mind, such as baseline years against which carbon emissions reduction programs are based, how land use factors, or percentage changes per capita versus absolute emissions reductions.

All the usual suspects as far as "developed countries" are covered in the chart, including Australia, Belarus, Canada, Croatia, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States. No, China and India aren't included yet.

If you average everything out, the pledges amount to a 13 percent to 18 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 versus 1990 as the baseline year. This, of course, is far short of the 25 percent to 40 percent that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that the world needs to stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.