C-Learn Simulation Puts High-Powered Climate Analysis in Hands of Educators and Students

Climate policy analysis is accessible to anyone with the online C-Learn simulation. Just plug in your estimates of what kind of emissions reductions you think it will take to limit global warming to 2 degrees (or whatever your goal is) to see the effect on the rise of temperature, sea levels, or global CO2 concentration. C-Learn is a valuable tool for anyone teaching audiences and exploring the impact of different levels of climate change mitigation on our planet.

Recently we updated C-Learn to make it particularly useful to the growing number of people running the World Climate Exercise, a role-playing game simulating the UN climate change negotiations. Coupled with World Climate, groups can act out what it is like to be UN climate change negotiators working to create a global climate agreement. By creating pledges and testing them in C-Learn, groups can plan how to prevent the highest costs of climate change. World Climate is played in classrooms throughout the Tyrolean school system in Austria and in many other classrooms worldwide. Materials to run World Climate are available in English, French, German, and Chinese. These latest updates to C-Learn make the integration of C-Learn and World Climate even easier by offering the same inputs as the proposals World Climate Delegations submit. The fossil fuel inputs now accept a stop growth year, reduction start year, and annual reduction.

Check out C-Learn, World Climate, and our other simulations by visiting our website!

Our Three Big Impacts

By Drew Jones, Beth Sawin, and Stephanie McCauley

What has our impact been?

Eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models — what does it add up to?

Here’s our informal assessment of how much of a contribution we’ve made to the global effort to curb climate change

Together with our partners, we see three big areas. We have:

Christiana Figueres with Beth Sawin at the UN Climate Talks in Bonn, April 2010

1. Kept things honest. Our mentor Dana Meadows operated out of the theory that societies will only find fundamental solutions to the challenges we are facing when the escape hatches of wishful thinking have been closed, and we’ve been working hard to follow her lead. When, in the first week of the Copenhagen summit, some global organizations began proclaiming that success was close at hand, we re-grounded our global audience in biogeochemical realities and watched the “spinning” subside, with global effects. When, during the Durban summit, some parties argued that current pledges were good enough to meet climate goals, we ‘ran the numbers’ with clarity and precision, providing solid backing to the young people and climate advocates who were questioning such easy assertions (view our Durban results blog post). More recently, when voices rose to declare an energy miracle or natural gas bridge solution to climate, while dismissing efficiency and renewables, we ran the numbers, changed minds, and noted that the words of key thought-leaders changed as well.

“[Climate Interactive’s] software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it’s the numbers that count.” — Bill McKibben in the UK Guardian

2. Improved policy design by top decision-makers. We have helped powerful leaders advocate for sound long-term policy. We have made John Kerry better armed with scientific insight, Jonathan Pershing more exact, China’s climate ministry more able to reach targets, EU’s Jacquie McGlade more clear, Bill McKibben more numerate, international analysts empowered, Hal Harvey supported by modeling, the media more informed and millions of activists grounded in solid science.

The hundreds of C-ROADS users can be found worldwide in more than 70 countries.

3. Motivated, inspired, and empowered, creating new possibilities (while avoiding manipulation and zealotry). We have motivated action and reduced emissions through the hundreds of thousands of global professionals and citizens who have taught others with our tools (C-ROADS, C-Learn online, Scoreboard, iPad Pathways app, Climate Momentum, Bathtub), shown others our videos (Beth Sawin on the Scoreboard, Drew Jones on TEDx, Travis Franck’s webinar, John Sterman’s lecture), led their kids through our first or second science museum interactive exhibits, or lived a successful global climate deal through World Climate, our mock-UN “serious game” played around the world.

Not bad for eight people, dozens of partners, five years, and two simulation models. Let’s see what is next.

Please be in touch if you’d like to support our emerging work.

World Climate Now in 4 Languages

Credit: officenow/Flickr

Our World Climate Exercise, a role-playing game that simulates the UN climate change negotiations, has been played around the world from classes of school children in Austria to a visiting group of Chinese officials at MIT. The interest and enthusiasm from the community of people leading this exercise has meant several have volunteered to translate our materials from English into French, Chinese, and German.

Materials for the exercise in French are the latest addition to the collection, which we recently received from Laurent Richard, a French math teacher in Boston. You can find these materials and our other translations among the facilitator’s resources on our website. Let me know if you’ve used World Climate — we are always interested to find out how our tools have been of use and would love further translation of our materials.

World Climate with Chinese Officials

Guest post from Professor John Sterman:

I recently ran the World Climate role play negotiation with a group of about 30 officials from China, as part of the IDEAS/China program run here at MIT Sloan by Otto Scharmer, with the help of Peter Senge and Joe Hsueh (a recent graduate of our doctoral program in system dynamics). We ran the session using simultaneous interpretation, with two professional interpreters and Joe’s help.

Most of the participants were provincial or municipal officials from Zhejiang province (near Hangzhou), along with some business leaders from the region and a few academics from Tsinghua University.

The Power of Games: Changing our Mental Models

Guest post by Cecelia Hunt:

Simulation games, like Climate Interactive’s World Climate Exercise, have the capacity to shift mental models. Mental models are frameworks that we construct subconsciously, which help us to understand and predict the world around us. They are dynamic and change based on our understanding of reality. Our mental models serve as useful tools in problem solving, but are often incomplete and can be inaccurate, because they are a personalized representation of reality rather than reality itself.

The flaws in our mental models can constrict our understanding of the world. When faced with new information, we typically try to incorporate it into our existing mental models, rather than change our models to match the information, thus leading to misconceptions. We also tend to use our mental models to filter information, and seek evidence for (but not against) our conceptions. For example, the “snowpocalypse” of winter 2010-2011 may serve as evidence of increased extreme events expected from climate change to proponents of human-caused climate change. To those who do not believe in human-caused climate change, however, this may be seen as confirmation of their belief that Earth cannot be warming.

Mental models play a role in the polarized views of climate change among the American public. , Because of the way we use our mental models, however, they often cannot simply be fixed through providing more information.

In a simulation, players interact with one another, participate in active learning, and experience a modeled version reality where they can learn from their actions. They are faced with a problem, and must find a solution. During a simulation game, players face the flaws in their understanding, and rebuild their mental models. Climate Interactive and MIT’s World Climate game is capable of not only yielding a mental model shift but also a much deeper understanding of climate change.

“World Climate” Mock-UN Exercise Energizes Youth

Youngest “World Climate” players yet!

Climate Interactive’s Drew Jones led a class of eleven seventh graders from Hanger Hall School for Girls through the “Mock-UN” policy exercise where three teams represent country groups and negotiate a global climate deal. They learned the biogeochemical carbon system through the “Bathtub” analogy and improved their understanding of climate dynamics.

19 Climate Games that Could Change the Future

The prevalence of games in our culture provides an opportunity to increase the understanding of our global challenges. In 2008 the Pew Research Center estimated that over half of American adults played video games and 80% of young Americans play video games. The vast majority of these games serve purely to entertain. There are a growing number of games that aim to make a difference, however. These games range from those that show players the complexity of creating adequate aid packages and delivering them to places in need to games that require people to get out and work to improve their communities to do well in the game.

Looking at the climate change challenge there are a number of games and interactive tools to broaden our understanding of the dynamics involved. Climate Interactive, for one, has led the development of the role-playing game World Climate, which simulates the UN climate change negotiations and is being adopted from middle school all the way up to executive management-level classrooms. Many are recognizing the power of games and everyone from government agencies to NGOs to a group of teenagers is trying to launch a game to help address climate change. Below are some of the climate and sustainability-related games we’ve found. Let us know if you’ve found others.

Students Experience Climate Negotiations in Simulation-Based Role-play Exercise

Providing a look at the reactions and lessons learned after participating in the World Climate Exercise, the video below shares new insights into the experiences of World Climate participants.

Professor Juliette Rooney-Varga’s students entered class a few weeks ago, unsure of what to expect from the day’s class. They had been told they were going to take part in negotiating a new climate treaty that week—a daunting task, even for the world’s political leaders.

The students were participating in the World Climate Exercise, a role-playing game developed by the team here at Climate Interactive to allow participants to experience the dynamics that negotiators at the climate change negotiations face and explore the ways diverse groups can find ways forward together. Unlike other types of teaching tools, the World Climate Exercise immerses participants in an interactive simulation that involves playing different negotiating roles from a member of a small island nation to the EU. As part of UMass Lowell’s Climate Change Initiative the exercise and the reactions of the students were captured in the video below.

C-ROADS Update Available – Download version 3.0 today!

Every new release of C-ROADS marks an exciting milestone for the small team here at Climate Interactive that began creating this model three years ago and continue to advance it in a world where the need for better understanding of the dynamics of climate and policy is greater than ever. From Copenhagen to Washington, and most recently, to Durban, C-ROADS has added scientifically-vetted analysis to the conversation and efforts to address climate change.

To build on the successes and address feedback from users, version 3.0 of C-ROADS adds many new features to this already robust simulator. We hope that these additional features and updates improve the effectiveness of your climate change efforts.

With the new version of C-ROADS you can…

• Test the sensitivity of the model results to different parameters under the Sensitivity Tab
• Analyze policies with new types of emissions targets such as emissions per capita
• Adjust GDP and population assumptions
• Examine six new graphs for outputs such as GDP and population
• Facilitate the World Climate role-playing exercise using the new control panel

Please download the new version of C-ROADS by logging into Climate Interactive or requesting access by filling out our download request form. A video tutorial and version release notes are also available on our website to guide you through the new features.

For an online demonstration of C-ROADS and the new features please join us on February 14, 2012 at 15:00 GMT (10:00 EST). Please RSVP to reserve your spot at this web event at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/728788440.

What we do and why are we doing it: a radio interview with Climate Interactive

What is it that keeps an organization like Climate Interactive ticking? Co-directors Drew Jones and Beth Sawin, along with team member and MIT professor, John Sterman, joined Radio Green Talk host Diana Dehm to discuss this and elaborate on why we provide the tools that we do.

Check out the interview here.

During the program John discusses how we use role playing to help people viscerally experience some of the dynamics at the climate change negotiations in the World Climate Exercise. As Drew put it,