My colleagues and I love social math because it tells stories and paints pictures that "stick," to steal a phrase. Earlier this year the Center for Global Development experimented with social math as a way to communicate the links between global warming and hurricanes. This week it put the finishing touches on a project that improves on this earlier work in partnership with the Confronting Climate Change Initiative: CARMA, a new website that pulls together "the world's most detailed and comprehensive information on carbon emissions resulting from the production of electricity."

That data alone, all in one place, is very useful if you're a climatologist or engineer. But from an advocacy communications perspective, the real strength of the site is the way it manages the data, layering it over easily-understood, eye-catching Google maps and allowing users to dig as deep by searching, sorting or parsing as one would like. You can search CARMA by country, state, province, county, metro area, city, power company, power plant, or zip code.

Advocates for action on climate change have had a big year. The issue appears, in one form or another, in business, sports, news and technology publications regularly. Television and film are also coming around. The public acknowledges the problem -- but it's much harder to make the issue a local one. Advocates face a "problem of the commons": Businesses and individuals will ask, "When the problem is everywhere, why should we start with me?" CARMA's big red dots are one good reason.