Talking Climate at Tällberg Forum

As our Climate Policy Exercise makes its way around the world, we have another guest blogger, long time colleague and partner Alan AtKisson, who details the latest event at the Tällberg Forum on his excellent blog  here. We condensed the 2-hour exercise into a 25 minute “interactive presentation” led by members of the Climate Action Initiative team — Jacqueline McGlade, Felicitas von Peter, Drew Jones, and Christine Loh (from left to right in the photo), along with an unscripted visit from Forum founder and host Bo Ekman.  

Click here to view a video of the exercise created by the Tällberg Forum team.  Or here to use the simulation tools shown in the session on Climate Interactive.

by Alan AtKisson

Morning again. Somehow folks crawled out of bed after dancing and drinking past midnight, and made their way to the big tent by 8:30 (it is full when I get there) to experience the climate change negotiations game run by Drew Jones and other colleagues.

First, Drew Jones — his voice almost wavers with emotion — reports the passage of the first-ever climate change legislation in the US, to the applause of this crowd. Then (I have skipped several steps here, including Anders Wijkman’s briefing on the not-so-inspiring status of the negotiations for the Copenhagen climate summit) we are divided up into groups. Our task will be the world’s task at Copenhagen: “to avoid the unmanageable, and to manage the unavoidable.”

Copenhagen Climate Exercise in Albuquerque

Today we have a guest blogger, long time colleague, the system dynamicist and systems thinker Kris Wile of Systems Thinking Collaborative.

Chris Soderquist, of Pontifex Consulting, and I delivered another Climate Change Exercise in Albuquerque today. Sponsored by Sandia Labs. The participants included scientists from Sandia Labs and math and science teachers from middle schools around the country.

The most surprising thing occurred during the second round of negotiations. Usually this is the time when delegates from Developing A circle around the Developed countries’ table to talk. Instead, all the participants formed a standing semi-circle around the C-ROADS sim and demanded to experiment with proposals. Different voting blocs committed to increasingly larger and more immediate reductions until they realized what it would take to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere. They broke back into their groups to finalize those commitments.

New Slides Tell Our “Open Source” Climate Sim Story!

Click here or on the image to the left to view a slide show detailing our Climate Interactive efforts and how you can partner with us to use interactive, accessible climate simulations to help stabilize the climate.

Provides a good update regarding our recent successes with the Climate Action Initiative in using our lead sim, C-ROADS, and lays out our vision for “open architecture” sharing of simulations.

C-ROADS Covered in Major German Press

Sorry to the non-German-reading folks, but thought we’d share how the simulation is getting picked up in Europe. Thanks to colleague Felicity von Peter for making it happen.  Click here to view the full text of the article.

Here’s an excerpt:

„Verschafft uns Klarheit über die Klimaziele“, forderte bei einer Klimakonferenz im März in Kopenhagen der damalige dänische Ministerpräsident Fogh Rasmussen. Die dort versammelten Experten sollten die Politiker über Ausmaß und Gefahren des zu erwartenden Klimawandels informieren. Insbesondere erwartete Rasmussen eine Antwort auf die Frage, ob die Politik an dem Ziel festhalten soll, die Erderwärmung auf zwei Grad Celsius zu limitieren. Diese Marge wird von den Klimatologen als „gefährlich“ erachtet, weil bei einem darüber hinaus gehenden Temperaturanstieg die Folgen nicht mehr beherrschbar seien.

Pegasus Communications’ “Leverage Points” Blog Covers Climate Interactive

This is a blog post by Janice Molloy of Pegasus Communications, from their excellent “Leverage Points” blog. Pegasus does a great job supporting innovative leaders around the world with their writing, publications, and conferences. I (Drew) read their materials and have attended 8 or so of their “Systems Thinking in Action” conferences, which is always stimulating and helps me keep connected to a wonderful community of people. Read the original here. 

Saving the World, One Simulation at a Time

Posted by Janice Molloy on Tue, May 26, 2009

 

By Janice Molloy

Can a computer model help save the planet? The folks at Climate Interactive, an initiative out of Sustainability Institute, are counting on it.

System dynamicists have been spreading the word about sustainability since the publication of Limits to Growth in 1972. So it comes as no surprise that a group of MIT-trained modelers has teamed with experts from other fields to create an ever-growing set of user-friendly, scientifically grounded climate change simulators. 

The goal of Climate Interactive is to provide fast, accurate answers to “what if” questions so that decision makers and others can see the results of different scenarios on carbon emissions, atmospheric carbon levels, and temperature. This information can then inform policy discussions at all levels–from U.N. negotiations to high-school classrooms. CI is also sharing their analytical tools using open source approaches so that others can adapt, incorporate, and build on them.

The online version of CI’s primary simulator, Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator (C-ROADS), was released today. Two other free simulators are already available: The Climate Bathtub Animation and MIT’s Greenhouse Gas Simulator. CI also has a blog, written by long-time Pegasus contributors Drew Jones and Beth Sawin.  

Try the “sims” and send the CI folks your feedback!

Innovative Partnership Launches Freeware Online Climate Simulation

A new partnership of companies and NGOs committed to open source climate simulations has launched a freeware climate decision support tool.

Check it out here — click on the big “C-Learn” banner.

C-Learn is the more accessible, online version of the C-ROADS simulation, which was recently seen in US State Department Special Envoy Jonathan Pershing’s plenary address in Bonn Germany to the UNFCCC. Now you can explore how changes in fossil fuel emissions from three parts of the world, plus deforestation and afforestation, will affect CO2 concentrations, global temperature, and sea level rise. And you can make your own graphs to show others your simulation experiments.

Running “Mock-UN” Climate Negotiations in Croatia from a Desk in the USA

As I write, 40 Croatian electrical utility executives and youth leaders are playing the roles of global UN delegates and proposing emissions targets to stabilize the climate.

They are in Croatia, feeling disappointed that their cuts in fossil fuel emission starting in 2030 or so keeps CO2 around 500 ppm, missing their goal of 350-400 ppm.

I sit at my desk at Sustainability Institute in the USA, waiting for the phone call that brings the next round of proposals to test in C-ROADS, our climate simulator, and display them in Croatia via our web conferencing link.  Mostly, I’m hoping they can work out a deal that hits 350 (actually, hoping we ALL can work out a deal….).

Miljenko Cimesa, an innovative Croatian leader and member of the Society for Organizational Learning/Croatia is hosting the event. He played this “Copenhagen Climate Exercise” in Boston a couple of months ago as led by Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Michael Goodman, Travis Franck, and other partners in a SoL training and has brought the technology home, hoping to spark more effective action on climate strategy. (Other stories of the policy exercise are here and here.)

I’m feeling amazed by the technological power of international communication, honored to be part of the SoL community that makes such shared learning possible, and happy to be part of a “Climate Action Initiative” team that has created a simulation that can help. May such collaboration and learning translate into a Global Deal. Soon!

…. Gotta go, the “delegates” are calling….

Ran the numbers. Showed the graphs. 377 ppm by 2100.  Not bad.

Bonn – Are Developing Countries Asking For the Wrong Thing?

Today’s post comes from Climate Interactive partner and lead modeler on the C-ROADS simulation, Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems. It was originally posted on his excellent “MetaSD” blog.

From the news:

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - China, India and other developing nations joined forces on Wednesday to urge rich countries to make far deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than planned by 2020 to slow global warming.

I’m sure that the mental model behind this runs something like, “the developed world created most of the problem up to this point, and they’re rich, so they should get busy making deep cuts, while we grow a little more to catch up.” Regardless of fairness considerations, that approach ignores the physics of the situation. If developing countries continue to increase emissions, it hardly matters how deep cuts are in the rich world. Either everyone plays along, or mitigation doesn’t work.

I fired up C-ROADS and ran a few scenarios to illustrate:

The top blue line is the AIFI business-as-usual, with rapid emissions growth. If rich nations stabilize emissions as of today, you get the red line – still much more than 2x CO2 at the end of the century. Whether the rich start cutting emissions a little (1%/yr, green) or a lot (5%/yr, green) after that makes relatively little difference, because emissions from the rich world quickly become a small share of the total. Getting everyone to merely stabilize emissions (at 2009 levels for the rich, 2020 for developing countries, black) makes a substantially bigger difference than deep cuts by the rich alone. Stabilizing CO2 in the atmosphere at a low level requires deep cuts by everyone (here 4%/year, brown).

Developed World Strikes a Climate Deal with Developing World (in a sim at least)

For the first time in our ~20 runnings of the simulation-based “Mock-UN” role-playing exercise, The Copenhagen Climate Exercise, the delegates from the developed world moved first in striking a global deal on climate.

(For more on the sim behind the exercise and why the heck we ask people in nice clothes to sit on the floor, click here).

The players were corporate and government partners of The Climate Group – a coalition of governments and the world’s most influential businesses all committed to tackling climate change. Bob Corell of the Heinz Center was playing Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon, and I (Drew Jones) from Sustainability Institute, was playing session chair Michael Zammit Cutajar.

Normally, the delegates from US, EU, Japan, Russia (that’s them in the chairs) and others wait at their comfortable table with the snacks, flowers, and power. And the delegates from the developing world (that’s some of them — Africa, island nations et al. — on the floor) crowd around the rich countries, asking for help.

But on Monday in Washington it was different.

Open Access Climate Models to Help Democratize Climate Change Policy

Thanks to Google Earth, citizen leaders around the world have access to satellite images of their local watersheds and forests. And increasingly, they are using the information to monitor the health of these places and to advocate for measures to protect them. Yale e360 has a good recent article on this trend, reporting that:

“Citizens and environmental groups are now using Google Earth to tracks threats to pristine rivers from hydroelectric projects, catalogue endangered species, help indigenous people in the Amazon protect their land, and alert citizens and government officials that boats are illegally fishing off the Canary Islands.”

News like this encourages our vision: that a democratization of access to climate change models could lead to a similar level of engagement and empowerment.

We are thrilled that C-ROADS simulation is finding increasing utility in supporting decision makers, like US Senator John Kerry, and US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, Jonathan Pershing.

But we see additional possibilities. Just as satellite information that used to be available only to those with special access is now being used much more widely by ordinary citizens and grassroots leaders, we think the output of climate models, until recently only available to scientists and climate policy makers, could be well used by youth activists, faith leaders, and community leaders, to build understanding, mobilize supporters and study the likely impacts of policy options.

We’re hosting a free webinar about the possibilites. See here for more information.