The U.S. State Department is using our interactive climate simulator, C-ROADS.
At the “NGO Briefing” of the UNFCCC meeting in Barcelona last week, someone asked the U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, “What analytical tools do you use to make your climate impact calculations?” Mr. Pershing answered: “We use a simulation called C-ROADS out of MIT, which is based on sound science.”
And, UNFCCC negotiation parties other than the US can now get their own copies of the simulation. Grants to Sustainability Institute from ClimateWorks, the Morgan Family Foundation, Rockefeller Brother Fund, and Zennstrom Philanthropies have made such access possible.
Interested parties can contact climateinteractive@sustainer.org
Best of times and worst of times for the U.S. here at the Barcelona UN Climate talks.
Today we received the “Fossil of the Day” award from the Climate Action Network for not passing a climate bill in the Senate.
And Beth Sawin and I heard a more optimistic group of activists sing “Happy Anniversary to You” to Obama on the eve of his election asking for climate action. Birthday cake and all.
So many delegates from countries around the world really looking to those critical Senators who could swing a deal towards hope!
Dr. Beth Sawin and I unveiled the new interface to C-ROADS today in Barcelona, at the UN meeting. We’re thrilled to have a stand-alone version that we can share with all the UNFCCC negotiation parties (and particularly their analysts). This “common platform” version we hope will enable multiple parties to calculate what levels of proposals to COP15 will meet climate goals such as limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees C.
The headlines in news, however, will focus on the African delegates walking out of the negotiations (we could see them in the hallways as opposed to the meeting rooms) to protest what the protesters in this picture saw as the Grim Reaper (Annex 1 – developed countries) killing the Kyoto targets. Surprised to see street theatre within the negotiation halls! By the end of the day, the delegates returned, saying they had “arrived at a solution.”
Delegate Grace Adhiambo, who helped explain the concerns, led Africa in the simulated “Copenhagen Climate Exercise” that we ran using the C-ROADS simulator in Gotland Sweden this summer. Before the press conference, I ran into her in the hallways and said that the same issues were coming up in Barcelona as we simulated in Sweden!
This Saturday I had great fun participating in Burlington, Vermont’s contribution to the International Day of Climate Action. Here are a few pictures and the text of the speech I gave:
Welcome to the celebration!
Today, October 24th, 2039 marks the thirtieth anniversary of a historic day. Historians agree that October 24th was the day when world’s people came together for the first time to declare a goal for the amount of CO2 in our shared atmosphere – 350 parts per million.
I was there on Oct 24th, 2009 – on a rainy afternoon at City Hall Park in Burlington Vermont. I know many of you were there as well.
As the world’s governments prepared to meet for the 15th time since 1992 – this time in Copenhagen – to try to agree to a climate treaty strong enough to prevent dangerous global warming, the people of the world took matters into their own hands.
Okay, so some of the other “human 350″s in the other 5000 events were a little clearer. But the Asheville, North Carolina, USA crowd was spirited and much bigger than we expected.
Hundreds gathered to support aiming towards a goal of 350 ppm for CO2 in the atmosphere.
I gave an 8 minute speech on a theme I’ve picked up from Beth Sawin and Peter Senge — the gift of climate change. IE, all the important things we are doing to address climate change that happen to be a good idea anyways (e.g., getting off of oil and coal, saving money, eating better, cooperating internationally, slowing down).
Mayor Terry Bellamy and City Councilman Brownie Newman talked about all the City of Asheville is doing to save energy. And UNC Asheville student and Sustain US youth delegate-to-Copenhagen Ellie Johnston tugged at our heart strings talking about what we can do for the 3 billion people on Earth who are under 24.
The post spoke to me because we on our “C-ROADS” team have been working to frame our results in ways that open new possibilities as opposed to continue to scare and alienate our partners with a dominant “doom and gloom” story.
Here’s the kind of straight talk we get from Joe:
The media and others want to move quickly from denial to despair, because both perspectives justify inaction, justify maintaining our grotesquely unsustainable behavior, justify sticking with the global Ponzi scheme in the immoral delusion we can maintain our own personal wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning.
Check out Nature’s article by Jeff Tollefson from this morning. It discusses how our C-ROADS model “translates complex climate modeling into readily digestible predictions.”
Simulation tool gives rapid feedback on implications of policy changes.
by Jeff Tollefson
A climate simulator that started life in a doctoral dissertation is being adopted by negotiators to assess their national greenhouse-gas commitments ahead of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen.
Dubbed C-ROADS — for Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator — the tool translates complex climate modelling into readily digestible predictions. Using data on greenhouse-gas emissions input by country or region over a given period, the simulator projects temperatures, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 2100.
The Climate Interactive team has been combing the websites and public statements of various countries, in order to assess the state of the global deal to address climate change. The table here is the result of that research. Check it out here and see all the references here. And go here to see what climate results we’ll likely get if all these proposals actually happen.
More and more commitments every month, and still much further to go!
The U.S. State Department is using our interactive climate simulator, C-ROADS.
