Giving Compass' Take:

• Google will begin estimating local carbon pollution from cities around the world as a tool for leaders to focus and improve local climate change programs.

• The company has only released estimates for five cities so far — including Pittsburgh, Buenos Aires, and Mountain View, California — but what can we learn from this new tool in efforts to make changes in other areas?

• Here are five ways to help right now in the fight against climate change. 

In the next decade or so, more than 6,000 cities, states, and provinces around the world will try to do something that has eluded humanity for 25 years: reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere and cause climate change.

The city-level leaders overseeing this task won’t have the same tools available to their national peers. Most of them won’t have an Environmental Protection Agency (or its equivalent), a meteorological bureau, a team of military engineers, or nasa. So where will they start? Never mind how to reduce their city’s greenhouse-gas emissions; how will they know what’s spewing carbon dioxide in the first place?

Maybe Google will do it for them. Or, at least, do it with them.

Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders.

Read the full article on Google's tool to fight climate change by Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic.