Photo:Tällberg Foundation
Saturday morning at Tällberg. The heat is already intense, sun spreading its rays over a landscape more typically Swedish than my imagination could ever make up. But inside the session tent I am suddenly in Copenhagen and it is December.
Robert W Corell, from the Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society, leads us through a simulation of the UN climate negotiations that will take place in Denmark later this year. The whole audience is divided into three separate groups: The developed countries becomes a rather small, but very self confident and powerful group in one corner. The biggest part of the participants make up the group Developing countries A, where many of the fastest developing and larger nations are found, such as China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil.
In the last group, Developing countries B, participants are asked to sit down on the floor (“because we are already under water”, shouts a person in the group). Here are the smaller developing countries in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.Among them many low-lying small island states who run the risk of being put entirely under water.
Not one way
Suddenly we represent the people of the world. In every group a “negotiator” is placed, presenting their bids. What if the rich countries accept peaking their emissions at a certain year? What if the big group of developing countries stop deforestation? What if they commit to planting trees? With a big sense of humour they take us through the basic attitudes of the different groups of countries.
On a screen the simulation graph shows us how the bids would actually effect global concentrations of carbon in the air. Often the red line, indicating the impacts that the suggestion will have, is barely moving. Sometimes it takes a leap down towards the line of 350 ppm (parts per million) which is our aim.
The most interesting insight of this exercise is that there is no single solution to global warming, it is not an issue of choosing between this way or that, but many paths that must be taken at the same time.
Scientifically tested
This simulation program is called C-ROADS and has undergone a scientific review from an independent team of climate scientists, climate modelers, and system dynamicists. It can be found here, together with a simpler simulator which anyone can try out different scenarios and see what they lead to.
The CROADS-simulator. On the left are “business-as-usual” scenarios, where the group Developing countries A’s emissions are projected to surpass the developend nations’ emissions after 2020. Putting in data such as “Stopping growth” or “% annual emissions” the graph on the right shows what concentrations of carbon dioxide would be the outcome. (Click to enlarge in new window).
