Making things better than they otherwise might have been

Click on image for a larger version. Sixth-form students took over the Waverley Borough Council Chamber to negotiate ways to limit global warming while navigating the thorny problems of conflicting interest groups.

Friends, by strange happenstance, I found myself recently in the Council Chamber of Waverley Borough Council in Godalming, a quaint well-to-do town in Surrey. And there I observed an intriguing exercise in raising the ‘climate consciousness’ of sixth formers from Godalming College.

Click on image for a larger version. The En-Roads Dashboard

At the heart of the afternoon’s workshop was a software simulation developed by MIT called En-Roads. It has a dashboard of high-level controls (carbon-price, amount of coal used, degree of energy efficiency…), and the software shows the implications of altering these controls for many key climate variable out to 2100. And importantly, the expected global temperature anomaly in 2100.

The controls are high-level and rather generic, but their ranges are updated regularly by the En-Roads team at MIT to represent a reasonable maximum contribution that each ‘control’ might have. And beneath each high-level control is a mini-dashboard offering more detailed choices.

I looked at this software when it first became available, but I have not made much use of it because the limited choices available to the user were already overwhelming. I found myself adjusting one parameter after another, and quickly became lost. And depressingly, in order to obtain a climate outcome below 2 °C at the end the century, one had to (more or less) turn every control to its extreme value. I found it depressing.

However, students did not get to adjust the model parameters individually as I had. Instead, the workshop leader gave a brief introduction to the science underlying climate change, and then the class was divided into groups representing:

• Developed Nations
• Emerging Nations
• Developing Nations
• Climate Activists
• Clean Technology Experts
• Conventional Energy Interests (aka Big Oil)
• Land and Agriculture
• Industry and Commerce

Based on a briefing pack, each group had to come up with suggestions that addressed the ‘business as usual’ result of 3.3 °C of global warming by 2100. The first round led to suggestions of:

• Taxes on coal
• Improved energy efficiency
• Reducing deforestion
• Subsidies for renewable energy
• Improved building fabric
• Large scale re-forestation
• A global carbon tax at $50/tonne CO2

Each suggestion was elicited and clarified by the session Chair (Shirley Faraday, a former mayor) with a sense of business-like decorum, no doubt honed at many council meetings. And then the consequences were discussed by the workshop leader (David Faraday, Shirley’s husband and ex-academic chemist). Then model-meister Jeremy Snell adjusted a single model parameter and the impact on graphs of:

• carbon dioxide equivalent emissions and
• carbon sequestration,

were reviewed to see at what year ‘Net Zero’ would be achieved. After the first round of suggestions ‘Net Zero’ occurred around 2080 and warming was reduced from 3.3 °C to around 2.3 °C.

As each suggestion was entered, the workshop leader would often open up a ‘control panel’ behind each slider which had extra details. And extra graphs showed the impacts of these detail changes.

Click on image for a larger version. The En-Roads Dashboard showing extra adjustments and details ‘behind’ the ‘Deforestation’ control, and the range of graphs available.

The afternoon consisted of three more rounds of negotiations each with a subtly different character in which different interest groups could either negotiate with other groups, or veto suggestions from other groups. The structure broadly reflected the structure of the COP negotiations, and one or two students took their roles very seriously. I recall that in round two, the Conventional Energy Interests (aka Big Oil) representative boldly insisted on a complete revocation of the carbon tax!

In the last round the issues raised by the different groups became more and more focussed on the particular value of a putative global carbon tax. If I remember correctly, the final estimated warming by 2,100 was around 1.9 °C. Since the current rate of warming is around 0.2 °C/decade and there are 7.5 decades left before 2100, the outcome represents a further warming by around 0.45 °C compared to trend warming which would amount to a further 1.5 °C.

So the afternoon’s endeavour had outlined a future in which things were a bit better than they otherwise might have been.

Overall Impressions

Overall I was impressed. My own communications about climate change tend to focus on explaining the physical processes in the atmosphere and oceans. This event focussed more of the geo-political, political, and sociological factors, and relegated the complexity of the physical science underpinning climate change to being a detail which was dealt with by the En-Roads model. In this context, I think this worked well.

The setting of the council chamber and the formal way in which the Session Chair addressed each team led to a overall sense of formality, and procedure, despite the desperate nature of what was being negotiated. And as we have found at the COP talks, disappointment and inability to make progress on key issues are central features of the real-politique of climate change.

Chatting with David, Shirley and Jeremy afterwards, I found that these sessions are just one tiny part of their wider efforts to make things a little bit better than they otherwise might have been. These Climate Workshop sessions are run through the local climate-focused charity Next Steps, which also runs a Library of Things, and workshops for children of various ages. David and Shirley  have also embarked on climate action personally through diet, transport (1 long-haul flight every 7 years) and through changes to their house similar to the changes I have made: Solar PV, battery, insulation and (I think) a heat pump.

In short, it was a stimulating afternoon, meeting inspiring people trying to “make things a little bit better than they otherwise might have been”. After all, what else can any of us do?

Addendum 26th June 2024

David Faraday sent me the results of the three sessions showing different paths to negotiating projected temperature rises of just below 2 °C.

Click Chart for a larger version. Chart showing the progress in projected Global  Warming at the end the century versus the round of negotiations for 3 different ‘sessions’ i.e. groups of students

Below are links to the negotiated proposals at each stage of each session. If you click on the links you can adjust the EnRoads dashboard to see if you could do better.

Session 1 

Initial Proposal: Round 1

After Negotiation 1: Round 2

After Negotiation 2: Round 3

Session 2

Initial Proposal: Round 1

After Negotiation 1: Round 2

After Negotiation 2: Round 3

Final Additions: Final

Session 3 

Initial Proposal: Round 1

After Negotiation 1: Round 2

After Negotiation 2: Round 3