Call to join the Open Task Group on Climate Change
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Scope
To motivate people to participate in the Open Task Group on Climate Change.
Definition
Result
Screenplay for the movie
Hello, my name is Jouni Tuomisto. I am an academy researcher in Finland. I am worried about climate change.
In this video, I will tell you why we need a global task goup on climate change. We need to assess climate change. We need to assess policies and actions that attack climate change. We must do five important and new things to succeed in this.
- First, we must share all our information climate change and related issues to everyone who might need it for any purpose.
- Second, we must have a collaborative workspace for doing these assessments where anyone can participate.
- Third, these assessments must be based on science.
- Fourth, the assessments must be organised in a systematic and effective way, so that they can easily borrow information from one to another.
- Fifth, any disagreements that occur during the assessments must be dealt with using systematic argumentation.
Earlier this week, I was in Copenhagen. There was a climate change congress with 2000 researchers and a lot of important politicians. Their shared opinion was that climate change is a serious threat to the mankind. We must act now. Every ton of carbon dioxide that is emitted today will cause trouble for decades.
The climate has an adjusting capacity. But the adjusting capacity is limited, just like your personal money. If you spend your money in a stupid way today, you will have less money tomorrow even if you badly need it. Therefore, actions cannot wait. The challenge we are facing is global and larger than any other we have seen before.
What can we do? There are millions of things that we can do to slow down greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The start is easy. Save energy. Switch off lights. Walk or cycle instead of driving. Don't buy energy-intensive products. There are lots of things you can do yourself, without a need to learn about Kyoto protocol, or without the need of the Government to interfere.
But there are two large problems. First, there are a lot of things that seem to be useful but actually increase emissions and make things worse. Only good knowledge can prevent us from doing these mistakes. Second, there are a lot of things that nobody can do alone. Concerted actions are needed, and these of course require large agreements to actually happen.
, and it is difficult to there are also millions of things that we can do to increase emissions and speed up climate change. And we are very used to doing those bad things. Are we bad? No, we have just built our societies in the wrong way, because we didn't understand this thing early enough.
But we don't get far enough with individual actions. The researchers in Copenhagen said loud and clear that the rich countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 % by 2050. What would you do if you had to life with only one fifth of the energy you spend today?
Well, you can't do it alone. The whole society must change. And then it becomes tricky. If people stop bying cars, car factories close down and many people become unemployed. We don't want unemployment, but we cannot afford the car-intensive lifestyle either. And bus routes are poor.
Therefore, we must solve many problems at the same time using concerted actions. We must solve the unemployment, and the bus services, even the way we think about moving from one place to another. And all these things must happen at the same time. This is an interdependent society.
Almost a hundred years ago, people wanted to solve contemporary problems using concerted actions. They applied communism. Well, we know that it was not really a success story. Some people have said that communism should first have been tested in rats.
I used to do toxicology once, and I know that rat studies are difficult and slow to do. And one study brings in only a small piece of data. With climate change, we do not have time for that.
Therefore, I switched to risk assessment and modelling. In an assessment, you try and describe how things are and predict what will happen if you decide to do something, compared with something else. For example, in one of our assessments we tried to predict how much the health of citizens is improved if Helsinki replaces all buses with new buses that run with natural gas.
It is not enough to have good intentions. We must act. But it is not enough to do something that looks good. If you suddenly had only one fifth of the money you used to have, you would need to plan really carefully what you do with your money. There is little room for mistakes.
Assessments are important, because they can tell us where the big mistakes are before we do them and find out the hard way. With the help of assessments, we can avoid mistakes and spend our money, or climate adaption capacity, wisely.
What is a model then? It is simply a quantitative description of important things in the world. I'll show you a simple example. I am planning to sell my car (Well, actually it is my wifes car, but she is two days on a scout camp, so I have time to do this before she comes back.)
I draw a diagram showing the important things. First, this rectangle is my decision: To sell or not to sell. This node is the price I can get from the car. I can get, well I don't know much about cars, maybe 5000-12000 euro for it if I sell, and nothing if I don't. Then I add the use and maintenance costs of the car during its lifetime in another node. And finally, I need one node about how important the car and the kilometres I will drive with this cat are for me. The car is of course useful, but I'm mostly cycling, so I put a fairly low value here. And then we sum these all up into a into a single indicator that we use to find an optimal solutions. The assessment advices me to sell the car.
Pieta: Hey dad, you don't have a node for mom's and our utility in the model.
Jouni: Gee, you are right. We should add that into the model. (Looks at the new result and becomes serious.)
(Goes to the car and takes the "for sale" sign away.)