A Climate Brain


Thirty years ago, a few companies started measuring their greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints, experimenting with carbon offsets, and making the first corporate emissions reduction commitments. The Climatographers, the first business climate-risk advisory firm in the U.S., assisted many of them.

Corporate climate responses have come a long way since then, and climate change is no longer just a chapter in corporate social responsibility reports. GHG footprints are everywhere, even extending to Scope 3. Emissions reduction commitments are “going big” with science-based, net-zero, and carbon-negative targets.

Nevertheless, the business risks posed by climate change have grown in magnitude and in number.

  • Until just six years ago, companies were being told that material physical impacts of climate change were still decades away.

  • Five years ago there was almost no discussion of systemic climate risk, which is now commonly characterized as the risk elephant in the room.

  • Corporate initiatives and strategies that stakeholders once applauded may now be labeled as #greenwashing, or by the new term #greenwishing.

  • Brand risk, market transition risk, and even liability risk are all growing parts of the business risk picture (as readily illustrated by several recent court rulings).

  • Complicating business decision-making even further are calls for business to lead the charge on tackling climate change, in effect substituting for national and international policy-making.

Imagine being able to access the collective climate knowledge relevant to business decision-making. Using TheBrain software, the Climatographers have focused for more than a decade on building a knowledge management system to that end - the Climate Web.

One way to think about the Climate Web, as shown in the GIF below, is as the ultimate climate warming file cabinet organizing 20,000 books, reports, and journal papers, 30,000 news and opinion pieces, 5,000 web sites and pages, 3,000 videos, and much more. More than 5,000 Topical Headings and 3,500 Index Entries help put it all together.

Climate Filing Cabinet

One of the questions we often are asked about the Climate Web is whether it relies on AI to scour the web for new climate warming materials. The answer is “no.” With the goal of identifying and delivering “actionable” knowledge, every one of the Climate Web’s thoughts and links (more than 700,000 at last count) represent intentional knowledge curation by the Climatographers.

The links below let you access different categories of resources available to you in the Climate Web. They represent just a small fraction of the Climate Web’s content; imagine being able to instantly access such content across hundreds of climate topics. If you right click on links they’ll open in a new browser tab and keep this page open.

We’re not necessarily recommending you start digging into what you find when you click on the links below. On-line exploration of the Climate Web can be a bit frustrating, which is why we suggest other options below. But if you do want to click around on-line, you might want to check out our Basic Navigation Climate Site. While TheBrain software is easy to use, there’s always a short learning curve involved.

Index Entries

Index Entries in the Climate Web are a great way to rapidly scan through climate topics because Index Entries are all linked together, meaning that if you’ve downloaded the Climate Web you can click through the climate universe in minutes. Index Entries link you to substantive topical collections through jump thoughts to the left.



Sources Headings

Hundreds of Sources Headings organize more than 15,000 books, reports, PPTs, and journal papers.


Most individual (and publicly available) sources are available to you as PDFs. What you don’t see here is that for many sources we’ve extracted key ideas, graphics, and more.

Individual Sources

15,000+ sources in the Climate Web represent books, reports and journal papers. In many cases we’ve extracted key ideas, graphics, and more, as you get visualize here.



News and Opinion Headings

Hundreds of News and Opinion Headings organize more than 30,000 news stories and blogs.

Selected Videos Headings

Videos Headings organize more than 3,000 YouTube, Vimeo, and other videos.

Expert Collections

Expert Collections pull together the work of individual experts you can then access in the Climate Web.



Organizational Collections

There are thousands of organizations doing good work on climate change. Organization Collections in the Climate Web point you to a lot of that work. In some cases it might just be a couple of reports, in other cases dozens of reports and other resources. Note that everything is topically organized in the Climate Web, not just listed alphabetically.

Networking Headings

Networking Headings organize more than 5,000 websites and pages.

Everything you’ve seen on this page represents basic knowledge curation in the Climate Web, representing approximately 10,000 hours of knowledge curation. Advanced knowledge curation, representing another 15,000 hours of knowledge curation, is the subject of another page on this Climate Site: Climate LEGOs.