Interactive Graphics, Vote to Choose our Climate

(click here to open site in new window. You may also want to read the long-term vision document about developing this into a global climate-referendum )

General

Layout and sequence: Some kind of frames arrangement is essential for storing the parameters as you move through the different plots in any order. However it may be too flexible, i.e. encouraging people to jump about randomly rather than follow the step-by-step introduction. Do you like to see many options and the animated demo up-front? How would you arrange the step-by-step sequence?

Level of explanation: I realise it's still rather technical in these early stages. But please tell me if you find which sections / terms /concepts you find particularly confusing. I will use your responses to adapt the text and compile "frequently asked questions" and a glossary.

Graphics: do these work well on your system? Any technical problems? Are the controls intuitive to use? Do you find the pop-up information and the automatic animation useful?

General comments on above:
(Web / Java experts: please suggest technical tips!)

Policy Options

More convergence criteria: (for determining distribution of emissions quotas between countries):
Currently it's based on convergence to equal per-capita emissions quotas. Other proposals include distribution by:

• Carrying Capacity /Ecological Footprint (i.e. based on agriculture, forestry and other renewable resources in each country)
• Population weighted according to factors such as local climate ( maybe people living in extreme climates need to use more fossil fuel?), or average age (maybe older people need to use more fuel?) etc.
• Economic turnover - GNP etc. (using both market and purchasing-power-parity exchange rates)
• Grandfathering (no convergence at all- i.e. based solely on emissions in a particular baseline year)
• More arbitrary bartering between politicians (i.e. the way it was done for the Kyoto protocol)
• A combination of the above. Please suggest mathematical formulae for combining factors.

More options for setting the global emissions (contraction) budget: e.g.

• Business as usual scenarios (e.g. IPCC SRES)
• IPCC intervention scenarios (S450 etc.)
• Draw-a-curve-freestyle
• Inverse model -i.e. set the global temperature curve, and work out the emissions budget needed to get there (this is a technical challenge!)
• Control emissions budgets of other greenhouse gases (seperately or as a basket)
• Control emissions due to land-use changes (or combine sources /sinks with emissions)
• Control emissions from international aviation/shipping and calculate additional warming effect due to NOx and water vapour.

Other policy options (probably require choosing from a list of text options at this stage)

• Emissions trading -principles, limits, timescale etc.
• International carbon taxes etc. instead of tradeable emissions quotas
• Global-scale subsidies for renewable energy, green technologies etc. instead of restrictions on emissions (who will pay?)
• Distribution of emissions quotas within countries, possibly to individual citizens
• "Climate-engineering" and sink-enhancement proposals -what's acceptable?
• Priorities for climate-related research.

Uncertainty controls

• Biogeochemical feedbacks -effect of climate on trees, ocean algae, peat bogs etc. and consequent effect on greenhouse gas sources and sinks
• Relative influence of other greenhouse gases (similar to controls for solar and aerosol forcing)
• Shifting ocean currents /thermohaline circulation and effect on regional climates
• Response of polar ice caps, albedo effects (reflecting sunlight) etc.
• Alternative population scenarios to see the effect on per-capita convergence
• Assumptions about fossil fuel supply, economic growth, and energy demand in business-as-usual senario

Calculation of impacts

(i.e. more dynamically created plots, maps, calculations etc.)

• Constraints on individual lifestyle to fit within per-capita emissions allocation.
• Impacts of emissions reduction on economic indicators.
• Impacts of global warming on regional temperature change-scientifically challenging especially for a simple on-line model, but it should be possible to make a crude map.
• Impacts on sea-level. It's relatively easy to calculate the effect of thermal expansion, but this may be misleading without also considering the response of the polar ice-caps, which is still very uncertain.
• Impacts of temperature changes on regional rainfall and extreme weather events -scientifically very challenging, as even the biggest global climate models don't get this right yet.
• Climate impacts on human health, mortality, economy, agriculture etc. -depends on regional climates and hence very hard to predict.
• Climate impacts on other species, biodiviersity etc. -even harder to predict.

For most of these, there are already other interactive tools and calculators on the web. Perhaps it would be better to arrange some kind of dynamic link to them, rather than re-inventing these wheels.

Other information

• Create emissions quota plots for any individual country, or group countries in other combinations.
• Show longer term climate history -comparison with 1000yr record and ice-core data etc.
• Provide java source code for the applets, or more detailed mathematical equations for the calculations.
• Provide tables of data -either as a spreadsheet file or created dynamically on request.

Comments on uncertainties, impacts and other information:
(Climate experts -please suggest formulae and sources of data!)

Voting procedure

• Reduce influence of default setup of parameters: e.g. insist that you have experimented with every option before you can vote, or set the default parameters randomly (even within a limited range, this might make the initial set-up look rather strange).
• Option to return later and change your vote: This referendum is designed to evolve gradually, are you likely to return to try new options or to adjust your choices to try to reach a consensus with others?
• Collecting personal information for statistical analysis: what should I ask, do you mind giving such information ?
• Controls to prevent people voting more than once -it's easy to detect people voting again immediately (try it and see), but harder to stop them coming back another time and using a different name. It's possible to restrict votes to one-per-computer (using cookies -although these can be deleted) or one-per-email-address (by sending passwords on request), but neither method would be very democratic! Any suggestions?
• Voting offline: it should be possible to provide a download package allowing many different people to vote on one computer offline, and then send the results as one encoded package back to the server. This might be particularly useful for developing countries where telecommunications are poor, but how can we ensure that the votes all come from different people?

Analysis of results and participation

• Presenting the results: This is not simple as the range of possible combinations of policy options is almost infinite. Results will be shown using statistical distributions, charts, correlations, etc. which can by created dynamically by the webserver on request, i.e allowing the user to probe the data in various ways (personal information will not be shown). This can't be demonstrated until I have more results. How would you like to see the results presented?
• Should the results be weighted, e.g. according to the total-population-per-vote-received in each country/region ?

Long-term development into a global climate referendum:

• Encouraging a wide diversity of people from many countries and cultures to participate
• Setting up discussion lists or teleconferences to encourage more people to participate in the development process?
• Gathering a team of people to develop this project further- how to fund this team?
• Developing a review procedure to ensure that the science presented within the referendum is as accurate as possible, and the questions it poses are balanced.
• Persuading "policymakers" to accept the idea and give it legitimacy for decision-making
• Offer a more limited number of "package" proposals, or group the results in some way, to make it more useful as a decision-making tool.
• Develop the interactive graphics further as a policy-analysis or educational tool, or even a game, rather than as a referendum?

Comments on voting, analysis and referendum:
("Teledemocracy" experts -please help me, get in touch!)

Flying off to a Warmer Climate

(click here to open Flying site in new window.)

Trying to discourage people from flying to holidays or conferences seems to be a thankless task, so I prefer to spend more time proactively developing the referendum idea. However, I have received many emails praising "Flying off to a Warmer Climate", and encouraging me to develop it further. What do you think should be the priorities for this site?

Developing the existing map-calculator

• Making the calculations more sophisticated, including different formulae for different aircraft, and taking into account the height flown and weight of fuel carried (e.g. NOx and water vapour impacts might be relatively less important for short-haul flights at lower level)
• Providing a drop-down list of cities as an alternative to the map
• Rearranging the layout? You might say it's "crowded", but if you hadn't seen both the map and the introductory text up-front, would you have delved further to find both?
• Converting the map-calculator into a java applet to make it more reliable (there are so many different versions of javascript that it's impossible to please all browsers!)

Providing more information or interactive tools about

• Emissions from other forms of transport
• Distribution of aircraft emissions by region or by country
• Aviation impacts on regional climates (I'm not sure if such data is available yet).
• Financial and other policy tools to reduce emissions.

Encouraging alternatives to flying by

• Providing more information about overland travel (and crossing oceans), -routes, tickets, visas etc.
• Providing more information about teleconferencing, setting up alternatives to flying for climate conferences.

Getting more people to look at Flying off to a Warmer Climate? How can an individual like me compete with the vast advertising budgets of companies selling "cheap flights" online?

Including policy controls for aviation emissions and consequent effect of NOx and H2O radiative forcing within the main chooseclimate interactive graphics /referendum

Building on the Climate-Train project (click here to open Climate-Train Report in new window.)
e.g. encouraging something similar for future climate conventions.

Comments on Flying off to a Warmer Climate

Climate Engineering review

Much has changed since I wrote this review paper in November 1996. Indeed, many of the predictions about growth of research on this topic and its influence on climate science and policy have already come true. There are not many entirely new proposals or issues, but some it is now clearer which are more serious, as the focus has shifted from general ideas to specific details of implementation.

The original paper should remain unaltered, as references to it have been made in other publications around the world. Also, I don't have much time to spend on this topic, preferring to proactively develop the referendum idea, than reactively comment on climate engineering proposals. However, I would like to:

• Develop a "what's new" page, and link to other resources online. Please help by sending me information, articles, links etc.
• Incorporate questions about this topic into the referendum (see above).
• Possibly use interactive graphics (as above) to show the possible impact of some proposals. For example, to show the effect of ocean disposal of CO2 on the carbon cycle and ocean chemistry, in both the short and long term, or the effect of changing the albedo on regional climate change. However the scientific knowledge on these topics is still very uncertain.

Comments on Climate Engineering

General Design of ChooseClimate Site

(click here to open site in new window.)

Translation: I'd like to translate the website into many languages. Any suggestions welcome (use box below)
Layout: This site is designed to work best on browsers such as IE4&5 or NS6 supporting both Frames and Style-Sheet positioning, with some fixes for NS 4 layers. But it should be possible to find pages with text-only browsers too. Please let me know if you have problems using the menus. Do you like the climate-emissions cycle picture?
Comments on general site design:
(Web / Java experts: please suggest technical tips!)

Submit form

Name:
Email:
Any other Comments

Before you go:

• Have you voted to choose our future climate?
• Would you like to you help me develop this website?
• Can we collaborate in some way?
• Can you suggest potential sources of funding for this project?

Please let me know!