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

ImageClimate 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.

ImageCheck out C-LearnWorld Climate, and our other simulations by visiting our website!

Stock, Flow and Loop Diagram of Climate Change from Fiddaman

ImageClimate Interactive partner Tom Fiddaman of Ventana Systems gave a climate talk at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman Montana on C-ROADS and C-Learn. The original post is was published on his blog, and you can download the slides here.

Cool hybrid stock-and-flow and causal loop diagram — even cooler in the step-by-step build that is included in his slides.

Much of this structure is in C-ROADS.  But water vapor, clouds, precipitation, and ice sheets are not captured explicitly. Nor the big red-dotted-line feedback loop along the bottom…… (yet).

C-Learn helps the Good Life Meet the Green Life

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Play the sim above or click here for a larger version.

A new simplified version of C-Learn has been released as part of a website called Converge, funded by Bonwood Foundation and led by Tracy Russ and Lisa Renstrom. They are spreading the much-needed “we can do it” message around addressing climate action, helping Americans to see “Where the Good Life Meets the Green Life.” The site uses C-Learn to illustrate that there ARE researched proposals that meet climate goals. Explore the EMBEDDABLE simulator here, read more about Converge on their blog, and, if you have a website, embed it on your own.

South and Latin American Leaders Engage in Climate Policy Exercise

Today’s guest blogger is our longtime friend and colleague, the system dynamics modeler and facilitator Chris Soderquist of Pontifex Consulting.

On July 30, I delivered a systems thinking session at George Washington University’s Workshop of Political Management of Change (V Taller de Gerencia Poliítica de Proyectos de Cambio). The attendees (over 100) were from South and Latin America and were all either politicians or representatives of political parties. During the session, when asked what important stock they were concerned about, one participant volunteered CO2 in the atmosphere. After simulating a simple “bathtub” model, I presented C-Learn as a proxy for C-ROADS. There was interest in getting access to C-ROADS for the upcoming Copenhagen summit; in particular, the Brazilian representatives were quite enthusiastic. One area of particular interest that generated discussion…not surprisingly…was the concept of economic and social equity between the developed world and developing worlds. Participants got the message about early and substantial interventions being necessary to achieve suggested targets.

Innovative Partnership Launches Freeware Online Climate Simulation

C-LearnA 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. Continue reading