Climate Interactive goes to Copenhagen

In December of 2009, the Kyoto Protocol gets revisited and remade at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Leading up to that conference is the scientific Climate Congress in Copenhagen, which is happening right now (in fact, today is the last day). This conference aims to synthesise "existing and emerging scientific knowledge necessary in order to make intelligent societal decisions concerning application of mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to climate change."

The folks from Climate Interactive (see also) are there and gave a presentation about their climate simulation software, C-ROADS, that's designed especially for use as a decision making tool for policy makers. It's fast, simple to understand and use, and produces predictions inline with the accepted climate science. The great thing is that it's being used -- read their blog for lots of examples (in particular, see the recent post about John Kerry using C-ROADS).

In two of the extra slides of the Climate Interactive presentation, they state:

It is difficult for decision makers to:

• aggregate diverse emissions reductions proposals into a single global emissions projection and
  
• mentally simulate from that emissions projection the resulting atmospheric CO2 level or temperature increase.

Tools are needed to help decision makers assess whether policy options are sufficient to achieve goals for stabilizing CO2 levels and limiting global temperature increase to within a safe range.

This is quite similar to the motivation behind the educational tool idea I pitched a while back. Hrm..