Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth, ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution with anticipated benefits ranging from weather forecasts to energy consumption estimates to predictions of disease outbreaks. As usual, it’s not the design of the system that’s the big challenge:

“We have been able to make computers work together. The challenge of the 21st century is to get people to work together… It will not be the technology that limits it, it will be the sociology,” Leavitt [head of the U.S. EPA] added, noting that the problem will be overcoming bureaucracy, politics, turf.

Link courtesy of Brett.