Today, PlayStation has launched Climate Station, an interactive app for PS5 and PSVR 2 designed to help educate users on the effects of climate change. Using real-world scientific data and produced in collaboration with research and policymaking organizations, Climate Station aims to make knowledge about meteorological systems and human-driven impacts more accessible to wider audiences.
In a blog post, PlayStation shared that the app provides a number of different experiences to allow users to dive into different aspects of the global climate. Weather Year, for instance, uses global weather data to create a model of the Earth complete with a year’s worth of storms, weather patterns, wildfires, sea-ice changes, human behavior, and other events. Climate Station also surfaces historic observations about global temperature, greenhouse-gas emissions, and sea level, in addition to visualizing projections for the next 75 years as produced by scientific models.
PlayStation developed this app with an internal team in collaboration with the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, Berkeley Earth, and the Playing for the Planet Alliance. It uses public data and research from the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change, and the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Climate Station is an important effort to address one of the core challenges to making meaningful progress in mitigating climate change’s harmful effects. Climate change is a complex, non-linear process with impacts that differ across time and space, making communication and education time-consuming and expensive. Further complicating matters, the scientific community’s understanding of anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change has evolved significantly over the past 50 years. This discrepancy between scientific consensus and popular narratives can drive distrust and conflicts with climate science, disrupting vital efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and, eventually, mitigate and reverse the effects of our rapidly warming world.
In addition, despite overwhelming scholarly consensus and consistent evidence from worldwide research projects, fundamental topics such as the existence of and threat posed by climate change have been repeatedly targeted by political polarization. The opposition to, marginalization of, and rejection of scholarly consensus and scientific research risks impeding or reversing climate-change mitigation. For example, the United States government has recently taken action to dismantle its climate change research capacity, including by axing dozens of previously awarded grants, removing mentions of climate change from public websites, and proposing the elimination of climate research labs at NOAA and NASA.
PlayStation’s creation of Climate Station presents one possible way to bring more dynamic, scientifically oriented, and engaging education to the broader public, but it may itself be vulnerable to the dismantling of climate science. As stated on its product page, and like countless other educational projects, Climate Station relies on data provided by NOAA and NASA. This data has long been collected and published as a public service by these agencies, but this may not continue, as some NOAA and NASA monitoring programs have already been cut.
For now, Climate Station is operational and an amazingly detailed resource for people interested in learning more about our world. It is also provided completely free, giving an accessible entry point into climate science, as long as you have a PS5. You can download it through the PlayStation Store right now.
