Motivation / Background
In order to minimize the negative effects of global climate change, a 2007 Bali Declaration of 250 scientists advocate for action "to limit global warming to no more than 2 °C above the pre-industrial temperature", a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union and a number of other countries. Achieving the temperature goal of no more than 2 °C will require that greenhouse gas concentrations be stabilized at a level well below 450 ppm. Indeed, many prominent scientists are advocating for a goal of 350 ppm based primarily on physical evidence from paleoclimate studies and current changes in global climate with corroboration from global climate model projections.
The first purpose of Climate Interactive's C-Learn simulator is to help you use a scientifically rigorous model to set a goal for CO2 in the atmosphere, explore what it will take to reach that goal and to empower you to share those insights with others via graphs and explanation in order to make such actions happen.
This simulator can help you:
- Learn. Understand the long-term climate effects (CO2 concentrations, global temperature, sea level rise) of various customized actions to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions, reduce deforestation, and grow more trees. You can ask multiple, customized "what if" questions and understand why the system reacts as it does.
- Make and deliver your own presentation. This simulator helps you create your own "what if" graphs and understand why the system is doing what it is doing.
The second purpose of the C-Learn simulator is to inspire other organizations and individuals to develop their own interfaces and uses for the scientifically-rigorous equations in the simulation. Our multi-organization effort, Climate Interactive, will be sharing access to the C-Learn model as an accessible, open-API web service so that others can create new interfaces and connections to other software. We hope others will create applications that are more advanced, more simplified, aimed at corporate leades, aimed at children, or written in Chinese, for example. Several such efforts are underway.
C-Learn is the 3-region, simplified version of the policy-maker-oriented C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support Simulator) simulator, which has been used in United Nations proceedings, the U.S. Congress, by top European Environment Officials, and undergone an external scientific review.
Note: C-Learn does not meet other goals of C-ROADS such as analyzing specific proposals in the UNFCCC process.
For more information, please contact climateinteractive[at]sustainer[dot]org.
