1. Embeddable Widget. The C-ROADS-based Climate Scoreboard spread virally through the climate policy world during the Copenhagen Conference and was embedded in thousands of blogs and webpages, reaching over half a million views.
5. Google Earth applications. NOAA’s Dr. Ned Gardiner used C-ROADS results to produce 3-D models of the earth, indicating the intensity of climate change impacts in different areas.
6. Role-Play Exercises and Serious Games. The “World Climate” Mock-UN C-ROADS-based exercise, designed at SI and MIT, has been led by dozens of leaders for thousands of people around the world, from high school students to oil executives to European Government officials. All materials are available online.
8. Online Simulation. The “C-Learn” online simulation, available free to anyone with internet access, has allowed thousands to experiment with a real climate simulation.
9. Sharing a Web Service. MIT’s “Center for Collective Intelligence” developed its “Climate Collaboratorium” where users can vote for their favorite climate strategy after testing the strategy in our “C-Learn” simulation, which is being shared electronically as a “web service.”
11. Educational Flash Programs. Dr. John Sterman at MIT and a team funded by Schlumberger created animated bathtubs for educational uses.
Overall, we’ve identified at least eleven forms that allow us and others to use climate simulation insights, tools, data, and other media to empower action.
He wrote: “Either way, if countries follow through on their pledges and follow on with more aggressive action, keeping global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius is still within reach.”
Note — by our calculations, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to drop 3.3% per year for temperature to stay within 2 degrees C.
With January 31st as the ’soft’ deadline for countries to submit to the UNFCCC their proposals for greenhouse gas emissions reductions under the Copenhagen Accord we’ve been hearing the question from colleagues and the press: do these submissions bring the world any closer to the goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5° or 2°C?
We’ve ‘run the numbers’ and our most recent analysis shows essentially the same results that we reported December 19th at the close of the Copenhagen Summit: if current proposals were fully implemented average global temperature would overshot the 2° goal and would in fact increase by approximately 3.9°C (7.0°F) by 2100. Our press release contains more details on the analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a new, way cool interactive map of the future of our planet’s climate. Check out the Map of the Future below. This new tool was developed as part of an NSF sponsored traveling museum exhibit. The interface is really great.
The reason I mention it is also because the science for the climate calculations is based on Climate Interactive’s simulation tool — C-ROADS. I was lucky enough to be part of the original team who helped craft the vision for the tool, which was based on absolute adherence to scientific accuracy, speedy execution, and (my main contribution) to do so using an ‘open’ design approach to enable future community based enhancements and innovative uses…like the Map of the Future. Read the rest of this entry »
What kinds of things are we doing to prevent climate change? How many ALSO seem to be good ideas for many OTHER reasons other than avoiding catastrophic climate change?
Above is a rally speech I gave on the topic to a crowd on a windy day in Asheville, North Carolina.
Beth Sawin, my colleague and program co-director here at Sustainability Institute, inspired the theme through a series of blog posts on this topic. Read them here and here. Peter Senge too.
And Colin Beavan (“No Impact Man”) has what I think is the definitive list of secondary benefits of vigorous climate mitigation. Read it here. Thanks to John Sterman for pointing this out.
He is overstating our uniqueness, but here are the top ten most notable moments and achievements.
1. Obama heard (at least they tell us). From our office in Copenhagen hosted by the Rasmussen Foundation and Sea Change, 48 hours before President Obama’s arrival, we created two rounds of customized real-time C-ROADS analysis of the COP15 negotiations requested by and delivered to a top White House science advisor who briefed the President before his activities in Copenhagen.
3. Real time analysis of negotiations happened. As draft texts were released, we analyzed their impacts in C-ROADS (supported by Zennstrom Philanthropies) really fast. Press releases during Copenhagen are here.
4. C-ROADS analysis got to the negotiators. A dramatically leaked confidential UN document (reported in a scanned pdf version mid-conference by the UK Guardian) had the words “Climate Interactive” and “Climate Scoreboard” scrawled across the top! Check it out in the document. Read the rest of this entry »
The collaboration of the C-ROADS team with Chinese climate analysts at Tsinghua University is growing via a university partnership.
At the recent UN conference in Copenhagen, Drew Jones of Sustainability Institute met with Professor He Jiankun of Tsinghua University (shown in the photo) to discuss extending and customizing the C-ROADS simulation to better match the energy development future in China.
And over the past two weeks, teams from Sustainability Institute, Tsinghua University, MIT, the Society for Organizational Learning, and Ventana Systems are collaborating to include important factors such as GDP, energy intensity, and fuel mix onsite at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Some of the group at MIT in Cambridge are shown in the picture. Dr. John Sterman (MIT), Xiaohu Luo (Tsinghua), Lori Siegel (SI), Drew Jones (SI), Tom Fiddaman (Ventana), Zhou Li (Tsinghua), Peter Senge (MIT/SoL), Rebecca Niles (SI/STC).
The not-for-profit group 350.org used our widely-available C-ROADS output data to create their own poster to influence delegates in Copenhagen at COP15.
Near the end of the conference, the poster you see here was pasted all over the Bella Center and seen by thousands. Read the rest of this entry »
