by Alan Levine https://cog.dog or http://cogdogblog.com/

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By request of Mike Kelly for a museum iPad kiosk to display data on C02 emissions measure at Manau Loa and reported by the NOAA Earth Science Research Data trends site. This creates a simple standalone display like:

The RSS Feed http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/rss.xml contains a mixture of monthly and weekly updates; it is the Weekly one desired because they give the data from the current week, a year ago, and 10 years ago. A sample entry:

<item>
  <title>Weekly CO2 Update for August 21, 2016</title>
  <link>
    http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
  </link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">2016-8-21</guid>
  <description>
    Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa <br> Week starting on August 21, 2016: 401.97 ppm <br> Weekly value from 1 year ago: 398.97 ppm <br> Weekly value from 10 years ago: 379.88 ppm
  </description>
  <pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2016 05:01:28 MDT</pubDate>
</item>

My original solution for this demonstration was to use Yahoo Query Language (YQL) on this feed to return from the results just the description text where the item title starts with Weekly CO2 Update and to limit the results to 1 item, e.g. the most recent. The YQL query for this was

https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20description%20from%20feed%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.esrl.noaa.gov%2Fgmd%2Fwebdata%2Fccgg%2Ftrends%2Frss.xml'%20and%20title%20LIKE%20'Weekly%20CO2%20Update%25'%20LIMIT%201&format=json&diagnostics=true&callback=output_latest_co2_stats

Sadly, as the web breaks, when Verizon bought Yahoo, they axed YQL.

This was re-written to use rss2json and works as it did before (see blog post).

You can see it in action at https://cogdog.github.io/co2/ or this version that uses a background image from the Mauna Kea Webcam https://cogdog.github.io/co2/cam.html