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July, 2009: Wireless Healthcare Market Brief
May, 2009: Cellular M2M Worldwide Market Forecast
Consumer M2M Report: The Approaching Mass Market
Additional information is available at Reports.
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Snaps #1: Climate Change and M2M
Climate change could be the most severe crisis humanity has faced since the end of the last ice age, a potential challenge of major concern to every person, government, and industry on the planet.
No-one can deny that ice is melting faster than anyone predicted not too long ago. This is true in many places, including the Arctic, Greenland, and on mountain peaks all over the world, while recent reports from Antarctica are hauntingly reminiscent of early reports of Arctic melting featuring rates that were revised sharply upward within a few short years.
A growing consensus that the causes are linked to human activity is evident, but climate change is complex and not fully understood; there is no shortage of scientists holding alternate views, while proposed actions (including those required by the Kyoto Protocol) generate reasonable objections and strike skeptics as alarmist. Whatever the case, when enough ice melts, sea levels rise; this alone is sufficient to warrant intensive study.
The study of climate change and M2M have something major in common: Remote monitoring.
For climatologists and governments, remote monitoring is essential for measuring the effects of climate change; meanwhile, remote monitoring services occupy a high percentage of the rapidly growing $45 Billion M2M market (Beecham Research own figures).
Beyond the most immediate concerns, acquiring data will, hopefully, enable great improvement in models of climate change, unravelling its complexities and increasing the accuracy of predictive capabilities. How can any government make decisions with major economic ramifications without accurate modelling?
Much as with M2M networks, climate data is acquired by both satellite and ground-based systems and includes (but is definitely not limited to):
- Emissions and pollutants (of particular importance to carbon trading schemes seeking to lessen greenhouse gases), including many parameters -- reflectivity and absorption, interaction with solar radiation and ozone layer, distribution, and so on;
- Wind and ocean currents;
- Temperature;
- Sea levels;
- Glacial, ice pack, and high altitude ice melt;
- Soil moisture; and
- Undersea volcanic activity and methane release.
Nascent experiments involving the monitoring of plant and animal populations, a related area of great concern, are underway as well.
If you consider all of this (and in particular the nearly 200 countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol) you might well wonder exactly how this monitoring will be best accomplished (leaving aside, for the moment, the additional challenge of processing massive amounts of acquired data).
Might this be left to NASA climate satellites, the U.S. sharing relevant data?
Not so, per a June 9, 2006, Boston Globe article detailing NASA’s shelving of a $200 million satellite mission designed to measure soil moisture, while the Deep Space Climate Observatory has also been cancelled and at least two other climate-related satellite missions have been cancelled and/or delayed.
On the other hand Project Vulcan, a collaboration between Purdue University, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy which seeks "to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past" is a reality (see an informative video of a carbon emissions map at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJpj8UUMTaI).
Project Vulcan will "support the demands posed by the launch of the http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/ Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO) scheduled for 2008/2009" and will be followed by The Hestia Project, a global version.
Other government funded (and highly creative) monitoring experiments employing M2M technologies exist, as for example the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWren), a government and university collaboration.
The massive scale (consider the Earth’s surface area: 510,065,600 square kilometers) and growing urgency of the challenge of global climate change suggest, however, that this is a job for government and industry, working with scientists. The NASA satellite collaborations and small government funded university programs using a mixture of "off-the-shelf" and custom-designed equipment can only lead the way; the industry best suited for remotely monitoring global climate change is of course the M2M industry.
By all accounts, this should become the dominant M2M business opportunity of the 21st Century. What could be of greater importance?
Links:
California Climate Change Portal: http://www.climatechange.ca.gov/index.html
Global Climate Change Research Explorer: http://www.exploratorium.edu/climate/index.html
The Hestia Project: http://www.purdue.edu/climate/hestia/
High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network: http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/
Orbiting Carbon Observatory: http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/
International Telecommunication Union report: ICT Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions: http://electronics.ihs.com/news/itu-ict-emissions.htm
Kyoto Protocol: http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php
Methane to Markets Partnership (in climatology M2M stands for Methane to Market(s), not Machine to Machine): http://www.methanetomarkets.org/
NASA Shelves Climate Satellites (Boston Globe):
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/06/09/nasa_shelves_clilmate_satellites
The Pew Center on Global Climate Change: http://www.pewclimate.org/
Project Vulcan: http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/
Project Vulcan Emission Map Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJpj8UUMTaI
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: http://unfccc.int/2860.php
United Nations Environment Programme: http://www.unep.org
U.S. Government Climate Change Technology Program (CCTP): http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
World Meteorological Organization: http://www.wmo.ch/pages/index_en.html
Alternate and/or Skeptical Views:
RealClimate (“Climate science from climate scientists”): http://www.RealClimate.org
Heartland Institute’s Environmental Issue Suite: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10488
U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: Media Hype of 'Melting' Antarctic: http://epw.senate.gov/public/ (search on "media hype;" this is a minority report)
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