Climate Interactive is looking for a new team member – a Senior Modeler to work in the growing area of International Adaptation and Resilience. CI is currently engaged in projects in Kenya and the Horn of Africa, and is beginning work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and possibly other regions of the world.
Too Late for What? Real Choices on a Changing Planet
Find out what leading experts on climate change impacts, activism, and policy are saying about our choices today and our world tomorrow. Add your voice to the discussion on our campus, in our community, and beyond.
Or, for those in Massachusetts go to Cumnock Hall, North Campus
Also featuring short films produced by UMass Lowell and Cambridge students and an open discussion of how to move UMass Lowell’s Climate Action Plan into the future.
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.
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
Happy to see evidence of our tools getting around in places we never knew…
Elevator of Drew Jones’s hotel. Rio.
Drew: “Hi, how are you doing?”
Other guy: “Fine, heading to the Summit…. What organization are you with?”
Drew: “Climate Interactive.”
Other guy: “Oh, I know your work. I use your Scoreboard in my presentations. BAU, Goal, Current Pledges”
Drew: “Great, who are you with?”
Herman Rosa Chavez: “I’m Herman Rosa, the minister of the environment for El Salvador and lead diplomat here at the Summit. Thanks for what you all do.”
Thanks for using it to make a difference, Minister Rosa!
In this one-hour webinar, three model developers and analysts from the Climate Interactive team will introduce the new features, from new output windows, to sensitivity testing, to more control over underlying model assumptions. The session will be interactive, with ample time for questions and discussion. Drs. Travis Franck, Phil Rice, and Lori Siegel will lead the webinar.
Title: New Features in C-ROADS 3.0 Date: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 Time: 15:00 GMT (10:00 EST)
Enjoy the video above of Climate Interactive’s Drew Jones leading the World Climate exercise for students at Asheville High School. Check out the Climate Interactive website for materials and instructions on how to facilitate your own exercise.
Today we have guest post by Professor Eliot Rich at the University of Albany, SUNY, who recently held the World Climate exercise for a group of undergraduate students.
University at Albany students and faculty at the World Climate exercise, April 2011
“When I left the simulation, I was driven to make a difference”
In April 2011, students and faculty at the University at Albany, State University of New York, used the C-ROADS model and the World Climate Simulation to gain perspective on the environmental and political challenges facing their generation. The simulation was part of a semester-long class on business strategy and sustainability offered to undergraduates by Prof. Eliot Rich, Department of Information Technology Management and the University’s Honors College. Continue reading →
We’re pleased to announce the latest contest to be offered by MIT’s Climate CoLab. This project by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT CCI) incorporates Climate Interactive’s C-ROADS model into a forum where people can test proposals and discuss ways to address climate change. Click here for details on the contest and how to enter!
Climate Interactive is looking for a new team member – a Senior Modeler to work in the growing area of International Adaptation and Resilience. CI is currently engaged in projects in Kenya and the Horn of Africa, and is beginning work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and possibly other regions of the world.
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.
Check out C-Learn, World Climate, and our other simulations by visiting our website!
Climate Interactive - The Blog 