Tom Fiddaman Shares the Power of Simulations

In his latest blog post, Climate Interactive partner Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems shares thoughts on his recent interview for SEED Magazine. The story discusses using models to develop “complex solutions to complex problems” and notes the utility of C-ROADS:

“having the capacity to accurately predict the utility of proposed policy—whether it be domestic legislature or multilateral agreements—in real time while discussions are ongoing, opens the door for an entirely new way to enact policy”

You can view Fiddaman’s post here, or read the entire article on SEED Magazine’s website.

The New C-ROADS Simulation Has Amazing Climate Analysis Capabilities

Check out this short video to view the new features of C-ROADS.

(Click on the “Vimeo” word in the bottom right corner to view a larger version)

The top five improvements:

1. Choose from 14 different reference scenarios, pulled from EMF and SRES

2. Create emissions scenarios by changing Carbon intensity

3. Land use emissions are disaggregated by country (thanks to primary research funded by Heinz Center and TCG)

4. Flexible analysis of historical contribution by country to cumulative emissions, radiative forcing, and temperature (this feature is amazing — watch the video….)

5. Flexible analysis of effects of uncertainty

Dr. Phil Rice of Climate Interactive created this short video describing our “new tricks.” The improvements were completed primarily by Dr. Rice, Dr. Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems, Dr. Lori Siegel of Climate Interactive, and Tony Kennedy of Ventana Systems, through a contract with the US DOE and funding from Zennstrom Philanthropies, ClimateWorks Foundation, the Morgan Family Foundation, and others.

Fiddaman to Lead Climate Modeling Course

Dr. Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems, in my opinion the top system dynamics modeler of climate change science and policy, will be leading a public training course next month in New Mexico, USA.

As person who has learned a lot from Tom over the past fifteen years, I would STRONGLY encourage interested folks to sign up.

It will be June 7, in Albuquerque New Mexico, and is titled “Climate Policy & System Dynamics.”

The description says, “Examine the dynamics of climate science and climate policy, using accessible small-scale models. The course assumes familiarity with Vensim, including subscripts as well as a general knowledge of current climate issues.”

He’ll likely include examples from his thesis model from his PhD at MIT as well as C-ROADS and other simpler versions such as C-Learn.

More details and registration forms for these courses are here.

Fiddaman Doesn’t Mourn the Copenhagen Accord’s Missing Emissions Targets

(This is a guest post by Climate Interactive team member Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems.  His terrific blog is here. This post originally ran at the blog of Xujun Eberlein: Inside Out China.)

I’ve finally recovered from a long and frustrating week at COP15 in Copenhagen. Like many, I never actually made it into the conference center itself – even though I had the needed secondary pass, registration lines were just too long. I bailed out when the Danish police started passing out coffee in the queue. Instead, I spent the week with the Climate Interactive team, analyzing potential proposals, talking to the press, and preparing briefing materials.

What unfolded was a bizarre flurry of contradictory official and unofficial draft texts of an agreement. In the final hours of the conference, language about hard targets, enforcement, and other encouraging steps gradually disappeared. In the end, the assembled parties approved a decision that merely “takes note” of the nth hour “Copenhagen Accord” presented by the US and BASIC countries.

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.

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).

Only The Most Ambitious Emissions Reductions Under Discussion Within the UNFCCC Come Close To Achieving Climate Goals

 

The diplomats at this week’s UNFCCC meeting in Bonn will need to aim towards the most ambitious proposals offered so far within the UNFCCC process if they want a global agreement later this year that will stabilize CO2 levels in the range of 350-450 ppm.

The figure to the left — the output of the C-ROADS simulator — explains why.

We collected emissions reductions proposals in the public domain up until March 10, 2009 (called “Current Proposals” in the graph and documented here) – and found that even if  they were fully implemented they would be far from sufficient to meet the goal of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels at or below 450 ppm, reaching instead about 730 ppm by 2100.

Building Confidence in C-ROADS

How does one build confidence in a system dynamics simulation like C-ROADS? Above you can see results from one important test that Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems did. 

Here’s what he did:

From the published papers and online data, we made a graph of the “CO2 in the atmosphere” results from historical data and from forecasts of two other highly-disaggregated models — MAGICC, BERN, and ISAM — when fed by three widely-divergent greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios (higher emissions, A1FI, medium emissions, B1, and lower emissions, WRE). Those results are shown above in purple.

The Deal We Need

Team modeler Tom Fiddaman (that’s him in the picture) of Ventana Systems and I are heading to Washington DC next week (Oct 16th) to run an abbreviated version of the Copenhagen Climate Exercise with C-ROADS (formerly called Pangaea) as part of a Tallberg Foundation event at the Swedish Embassy.

The theme of the event is “The Climate Deal We Need,” and the afternoon will provide an opportunity to talk together about the progress in the UN climate negotiations, and, as the hosts say, “gain new insights about the wider scientific and political contexts in which the climate talks take place.” You’ll also get to hear the latest from some top European leaders and three of my climate stars: Jim Hansen, Bob Corell, and Christine Loh.

Part of the program is pasted above– the overall program is attached here. Hope you can attend — click here for the registration page.

(days later) Here are some reflections on the event by Tom Fiddaman.