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Browser-based climate change simulation

en-roads.climateinteractive.org

11–20 of 276 posts

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#13
Interesting tool. It basically says you can:

- Tax coal, oil, natural gas, bioenergy

- Subsidize renewables, nuclear, new technology

- Increase efficiency and electrification of transports, buildings, and industry

- Reduce population growth

- Reduce economic growth

- Reduce deforestation

- Increase afforestation

For an effect that puts us at +2.1C by 2100 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=120...

OR you can do these three things:

- Set a high price on carbon

- Reduce emissions of methane and other gases

- Increase usage carbon removal technologies

for a similar effect of +2.1C by 2100 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p39=25...

All optimistic actions combined puts us at +1.0C by 2100 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=120...

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#14
post #11

Everyone get your thinking hats on. Based on this model, increasing building efficiency is the #1 way that we as entrepreneurs can have an impact. Passivhaus anyone?

Buildings and Industry is the heading, which covers a lot more than just housing.

Correct but there is nothing preventing the use of Passivhaus technology in commercial buildings.

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#15
post #4
post #2

If you drag all of the bars to their ideal position (lowest on the bad things, highest on the good things) the temperature still goes up by more than a degree.

It helps to show that we're screwed. But the degree to how screwed we are can vary a bit.

We're not screwed if it's limited to just a degree. Things start getting dicy at 2 degrees, more severe at 3, and so on. To what extent society can adapt and mitigate is a guess. The climate modes are about the climate, not how human civilization handles it.

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#17
post #13

Interesting tool. It basically says you can: - Tax coal, oil, natural gas, bioenergy - Subsidize renewables, nuclear, new technology - Increase efficiency and electrification of transports, buildings, and industry - Reduce population growth - Reduce economic growth - Reduce deforestation - Increase afforestation For an effect that puts us at +2.1C by 2100 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=120..…

It makes sense, setting a high price on carbon is like lowering one end of the teeter totter vs raising the other for everything listed - the same thing just spelled out different ways.

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#18
post #5

it'd be nice to have a body count somewhere...

Also a count of people newly entering poverty, being displaced, increased spending on recovery from extreme weather events, increased spending on dikes (I'm Dutch, but a lot of countries will have to do that), increased mortality from the pollution (currently it's already in the millions of premature deaths per year but very few people know this), which animal and plant species will go extinct, etc.

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#19

what does 'new technology' even mean and how does it enter the calculations?

From the app: "Discover a brand-new cheap source of electricity that does not emit greenhouse gases. Some speculate that such a breakthrough could be nuclear fusion or thorium-based nuclear fission, however, there are unknown risks associated with any new energy supply. Decide when the breakthrough occurs, its initial cost relative to coal, and how long the delays in commercialization and scale up would be."

Re: Browser-based climate change simulation

#20
These are too abstract for most humans. Someone needs to do a layer on top of this that instead has options like:

- fake meat becomes widely adopted and we stop farming cattle

- electric cars see 50% market share adoption

Tangible things anyone can wrap their head around.

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