CO2 emissions data on Google Earth

Tweet. A Google Earth for displaying CO2 emission info across North America. See this WSJ article about it -- includes a video demo. Very cool.

(via nature.com)

Another SE/Climate Change theme: decision support

(Note: I've tagged all the previous posts on software engineering and climate change with the label "SECC".  Read them here, or get the feed here.)

Another theme in the software engineering and climate change arena would have to be that of decision support.  We cover this somewhat in our discussions of raising awareness (where, for instance, we talked about a handheld tool that reads out the supply chain carbon footprint of a produce in the supermarket) but I think somehow it's helpful to separate the two themes. Awareness raising includes much more passive and less specific activities than decision making support tools.  

Erm, but that's just preamble, really.  Mainly I just wanted to post this example of a decision support tool for climate change: MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence's Climate Collaboratorium.  

This system, currently under development, will use an innovative combination of internet-mediated interaction, collectively generated idea repositories, computer simulation, and explicit representation of argumentation to help large, diverse, and geographically-dispersed groups systematically explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concerning systemic challenges.

For something less wordy take a look at the YouTube video on the "deliberation component" is a little clearer.  It looks like a set of protocols for using an online discussion board in the capacity of an argument map.  

Al Gore tells scientists to speak up

Al Gore tells the American Association for the Advancement of Science that scientists need to speak up about the urgency of climate change:

"... the U.S. coal industry has invested a half-billion dollars in advertising and lobbying to reinforce the misleading message that coal is clean and efficient.  

"When they spend $500 million putting their version of this story in the minds of the American people," he told the AAAS audience, "it increases the importance of you being willing to speak out and, as civic scientists, of finding ways to communicate the truth about what this huge increase in global warming pollution is doing.

... [big snip here] ...

"If I could," Gore concluded, "I would motivate you to leave this city after this meeting and start getting involved in politics. Keep your day job, but start getting involved in this historic debate. We need you."

Read more about it here (includes video).

via Climate Feedback on Nature.com (which, curiously, references Gore's speech with a link to a Google News search).

It's like, so meta

So I've been reading up a bit more on the Climate Interactive project (brought to you by the Sustainability Institute and MIT's Center for Collaborative Intelligence).  One part of their approach to climate issues involves building and distributing simulations for education, persuasion, and decision-making.

The rest of what they're doing is a little more "meta": they're building simplified climate models and a framework around those models to make it easier for others to create simulations.  A platform for constructing climate simulations.  Okay, cool -- rather than create the thing, create the machine so that anyone can create the thing. Oh, and open the process too. 

I think this idea may hit at a level which has a bit more traction for my background (as a computer science student) than what I've been doing.  For the past while, I've been looking into what sort of educational tool to build.  I'm no teacher, so I've been reading papers and speaking to educators to find out where I can help.  I'm working this angle, and it's going, slowly, but the idea of creating the framework for making simple climate simulations -- well, that's something that on first blush seems to more closely suit my capabilities.  Hrmm..

Maybe it's not so complicated

Sometimes I get frustrated with how much effort and time it takes for change to happen.  Most of my research focus and much of my personal time is spent on how to make the world a better place.  Well, at the very least, make sure we all survive long enough to continue the quest of making the world a better place. 

So, when I get frustrated with these sorts of endeavours, I lament that life isn't simpler.  That people would just listen to common sense.  And that we all might just get on with it and do the right thing already!#$%&.  You know?   You know.   It's hard sometimes to wait around for various tipping points of public opinion to occur.

Which is why I like the spirit of the following video.  It dispenses with the tactful and gets down to the business of teaching the essentials.  (Or it's all satire, you decide.)

Um, if you haven't seen it already, and even if you have, I need to say a few words first.  

This video contains coarse language, sexual imagery, images of violence, and racist language and stereotypes.  Viewer discretion is advised.  It might not be exactly appropriate for a research blog that's syndicated on Planet DCS@UofT, but then again you don't need to watch the video.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes humour and directness make the things we struggle so hard to convey by other, more complicated, means laughably obvious.   If I think about my work with climate change and when I'm in one of those frustrated moods, part of me wants to do something as seemingly tactless and extreme as this video.  You know, 

join a party, 

join a party, 

join a #$%^% political party.

...

meh, too many syllables. Forget that idea.   Point is, a little humour and lampooning can go a long way.  Especially if it get's the message out.  

So, if there's anyone out there not doing the sort of serious research I am doing but is looking for a fun project to help save humanity then my suggestion is to follow this video's lead.   And write to me and I'll send you the uncensored version of the lyrics I came up with whilst on the train yesterday...

Bathtub dynamics and climate change

In Understanding public complacency about climate change, Sterman & Sweeney speculate that:

Low public support for mitigation policies may arise from misconceptions of climate dynamics rather than high discount rates or uncertainty about the impact of climate change. 

In the study they investigate the sorts of errors people make with "simple" stocks and flows problems, since these sorts of problems are fundamental to understanding the climate and climate change. 

Here's an example of one their tests:

After a bit of education about climate and climate dynamics, participants are shown the top chart and asked to fill in the bottom chart.  That is, given a scenario of future CO2 concentration what would be the corresponding emissions and removal rate of CO2. They have to extend the emissions line to the right, and also draw in the corresponding net removal rate, so that the top chart is explained by the bottom.

Their study finds that most people fail this test.  They assume that if the CO2 concentration rises a little and then levels off, so too must the emissions have risen and then levelled off.  Most people keep the removal rate constant or have it rise and level off too and they keep it well below the emission rate.

If you haven't spotted why these answers are wrong yet, think about bathtubs.  (This is a popular metaphor used by Sterman and Sweeney elsewhere.  See below.)  We can think of the above example in terms of a bathtub.  Replace the atmosphere with a bathtub and CO2 with water.  Now, the emission rate is the rate water is flowing into the tub from the tap, removal rate is the rate water flows out the drain, and CO2 concentration is the water level. 

In the example above, the question is: given that the water level rises but eventually stops rising and stabilises, what needs to happen to the rate of the water from the tap and through the drain Obviously if the water level stabilises eventually then both the rate the water is running into the tub and the rate the water is draining out must converge.  I think you can work the rest out for yourself. 

That these kinds of problems (systems thinking) are so tricky to answer correctly means we likely have the wrong intuitions of climate dynamics.  We may think certain climate change mitigation strategies are effective enough even when they aren't at all.  The sort of thinking that leads to you to the wrong answers above would also lead you to be in favour of a strategy that simply stops are CO2 emissions from rising from today's levels as a way to stop CO2 concentration from rising.  Wrong.  They have to drop, and drop dramatically enough to reach the removal rate.  And that's only the explanation that you get without invoking all the other, even trickier bits of systems dynamics like feedbacks and delays.

This study is cool because it isolates a class of tricky concepts that are fundamental to understanding climate change and its mitigation.  The suggestion is that if we could only teach people basic systems dynamics concepts then they'd make the right decisions.  We've seen this is not the case entirely, but I suspect it's part of it.

In any case, this paper gives me the framework for a study.  It gives me something concrete to measure and something concrete to teach.  I can imagine a study where I measure how well students do on these sorts of "bathtub dynamics" tests before and after they use the tool/visualisation/etc.. I develop.  

Cool, I'm starting to see ground.

As I mentioned above, the bathtub metaphor is one that's been used quite a bit.  Here are some very interesting and relevant links:

• Linda Booth Sweeney's recent blog post on the subject. A great post about bathtub dynamics and climate change, with some excellent (but broken) links at the end which I'll repeat here (but fixed, of course).
• John Sterman's interactive bathtub dynamics and greenhouse gas emissions simulator.  This basically steals all my recent ideas for climate change teaching tools and knits them together into a really slick flash application.  You get a bit of background and a few simple demonstrations/experiments that drill the stocks and flows concepts in.  
• A simple and fun bathtub dynamics climate model from SEED that puts you in a similar situation to the test I describe above, and then allows you to see future predictions under three different mitigation scenarios. 
• And finally, an cool looking blog associated with an exceptionally cool looking initiative called climate interactive. The project here is to create climate simulations (and entire simulation platform) that have "engaging interfaces and compelling output displays" with the express purpose of getting these simulations out in the hands of the general public and policy makers to enable them to make better decisions.  
  
  Well now, I think I've found folks to work with, wouldn't you say?  I haven't dug much into this project yet, but as I do I'll post up what I find.  Exciting stuff.
  
  

How do you follow blog comments?

I follow most of the blogs I read by using an RSS aggregator of some sort.  Typically I just sign up for the blog posts, and then I check the blog's website occasionally if I want to see the comments.  But then I often miss out when a good conversation starts up.  

For some blogs I sign up for the comments feed, but then I've got feeds in one place, posts in the other, and the comments aren't nicely grouped with the original post, in Google reader you can't sort by title (as far as I can see), etc.  Guess I just want threading for my rss posts and comments.  

Help me out here.  How do you follow you blog comments?

Australian Pyschological Society

As a follow up to the last post, I'd like to post a few pointers (and some "props") to the Australian Psychological Society.

First the props. I've been impressed with the emphasis on mental health in Australia since I first heard about it a few years ago with the beyondblue initiative. The purpose of this intiative is to make depression a national priority and bring out depression from being stigmatised to being discussed in the wider community beyond just mental heatlh professionals. Very, very cool, and very very necessary. Relatives of mine who teach elementary school out in BC tell me that this program has produced curriculum aimed specifically at teaching gradeschool kids techniques for good mental health. Even cooler.

Anyone who knows me, knows I talk a lot about the mental health aspects of being involved in environmental issues, of being the activisty sort, or of being neither but still coming to grips with the media reports and general environmentalist chatter. I believe recognising and openly discussing and dealing with mental health issues (especially ones that don't seem "severe" or seem part of every day life) is immensely important in effectively coping with environmental issues. Good mental health => sustainable, effective positive action.

So, it's incredibly impressive to see these topics being dealt with directly by the APS. They have an entire section of their website devoted to research on the topic of the psychology and climate change. In particular, check out this excellent "tip sheet" on what you can do to deal with climate change.

The psychology of action

I'd like to elevate a comment Steve made on yesterday's post to be sure it's not missed.

There's an interesting article in Sunday's Toronto Star, elaborating on the point Aran was making about the psychology of climate change:
http://www.thestar.com/article/584093

The article discusses social psychology research suggesting that for people to take action they need to feel a little peer pressure -- that what they're doing is in-line with social norms. Scary forecasts, or single helpful actions (like buying efficient light bulbs) don't really work without the pressure of feeling like the actions are socially approved.

The article references a study where participants were given feedback on their home energy use including an indicator as to how well or poorly they were doing compared to the rest of the group. Virtually every participant cut-down on their energy use. Cool. I believe this sort of effect is what the folks at Zerofootprint have in mind with there service that connects communities around their carbon consumption.

This suggests a new avenue of attack in the persuasion theme of software engineering contributions to fighting climate change: fostering social norms of beneficial actions. Here we can apply all that we know about awareness tools from software development environments, how teams work and share ideas, how to present complex information sensibly, etc...

Discussion on SE and climate change

Here's a quick summary of our discussion last week on SE and climate change:

• Greg talked about awareness tools for scientists. Example: a simple recommendation system that feeds you recent publications/datasets you're likely to be interested.
• Aran suggested a new theme to add to the list, which I called Persuasion. We've talked before about improving people's awareness of climate change and their impacts, but never about what SE can do to persuade people to change their behaviour directly.
  
  One suggestion (which may already exist? not sure): a tool to monitor website usage in order to track where in the site people are leaving the site, or what actions on the site they take (e.g. joining a mailing list, donating, etc.). With this information a campaign can tune its conversion pipeline to better convert people over to its cause.
• We had a few additions to the list of idea on reducing emissions: home automation, improving telecommutting and the mysterious "dynamic" insulation idea (I still don't know what that is).
  

Overall the discussion was pretty loose, and wondered far and wide. I'd like to see it more focused, but I'm not sure how we'd do that.

Comments and suggestions very much welcome.

WWF light bulb advert

Tweet. When I talked about why we can't buy our way out of climate change (and why it's misleading and harmful to pretend we can) I should have included a link to this advert by the World Wildlife foundation:

SE and climate change brainstorm distilled

I've already posted a summary of the brainstorming sessions we had last year. I'd like to distill my notes even further for our first meeting of the new year, tomorrow.

There are three themes that came up:

• Access to information
• Improve the SE of climate models
• Reduce emissions

Unpacking these themes covers most of our ideas from the brainstorm:

• Access to information. raise awareness of climate change and our impacts (e.g. interactive models and games, cool visualisations, querying), provide decision support tools (e.g. 'what-if' models, hand-held footprint reader), and enable data sharing (e.g. metadata management, querying)
• Improve the SE of climate models. collaboration support, V&V, workflow tools, reproducible research tools, modularisation, programming skills.
• Reduce emissions: low-power software.