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[PTTG]

Of course, there's been a lot of suggestions along the lines of "Add climate zones". I'm responsible for one of them myself. After looking through the notes, I realize that they are, of course, planned.

What occurs to me, though, is that when we have the infrastructure for displaying climate information, there is also the opportunity to combine a lot of information and projections about future climate change in a very accessible way.

I for one think it would be very neat to use this opportunity. Besides possibly fitting with the theme of recolonizing earth in the future, it is also a fascinating way of allowing people to really get a sense for what the abstract changes predicted mean in a concrete sense.

I suppose that modifying the whole set of planet data to be half a meter closer to sea level might be difficult, and I'm not sure how you'd go about hosting this alternate data set. Presumably Futurearth would be distributed in the same way as mars, moon, and hypothetical planet data.

[cameni]

Not guaranteeing that it will be done in a way that allows for this, but technically we are attempting to match the current climate and biomes to a model that would predict them.

For example, there's a relation between the temperature and latitude and altitude. The snow line and occurrence of most vegetation types depend on the minimal temperature and precipitation. Thus, if we compute the temperature and precipitation minimums/maximums for the current location, add a rough differential map that accounts for the effects of ocean currents, mountain ridges and other effects, and derive the biome from these numbers (in a way that matches the known distribution), it would allow us to tweak the parameters to get the look of earth in different conditions. I guess it could work relatively well in some range of values around the known scenario.