UN-Google Earth map climate change (Reuters/CNN)

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- After letting computer users soar over Mount Kilimanjaro's melting snows and peer down on illegal logging in Asia, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) is exploring how the latest technology can help it reach more people, an official said on Wednesday.

It hopes to copy the success of a venture with Google Inc. that made an atlas of before-and-after satellite images of environmental change available to more than 100 million viewers through the interactive mapping program Google Earth.
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UNEP's "Atlas of Our Changing World" was first published in hardback in June 2005 and features high-resolution images of changes ranging from dramatic deforestation in South America to retreating glaciers in the North Pole, oil exploration in Canada and the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain.
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Late last year, U.N. officials finished uploading the atlas to Google Earth, which covers a third of the world's population in images detailed enough to show cars.

As a result, users can now zoom in and fly over virtual environmental "hotspots" like the explosion of shrimp farms on Thailand's west coast, China's massive Three Gorges Dam or the vanishing snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/02/08/un.google.reut/index.html

http://earth.google.com/

The current download is pretty resourse-intensive; see http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html to see if your computer qualifies (http://earth.google.com/download-earth3.html for the previous version)

environmental change. Way to go Google!