Mapping the Contours of Climate Change
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Independent Minds
With formal negotiations on the new international climate change treaty due to open in three weeks time, Independent readers are starting to work with the Debategraph community to develop a comprehensive map of the issues around climate change that are confronting the negotiators.
The map (above) is part of a wider online collective intelligence project, ESSENCE 2009 – being run in conjunction with the Open University and MIT and supported by the World Federation of UN Associations – that is building towards the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The map is still in the early stages of development; however, it has already benefited from significant input from, among others, Mark Klein at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and the excellent debates at the IQ2 Green Festival on Climate Change held at the Royal Geographical Society at the end of January.
As before, the whole structure of the map is like a wiki – every aspect is mutable provisional, and open to further refinement – and anyone can add new issues, positions, arguments, events and evidence to the map.
The aim is to weave together the key scientific and political arguments – from all perspectives on the subject – into a rich, transparent structure that anyone can explore and gain a relatively deep understanding of the complex considerations and choices quickly; confident in the knowledge that, as the map matures, all views are being represented fairly, succinctly and in full.
So where you spot gaps, or incorrect and/or unchallenged arguments on the map, please help us to fill the gaps and correct and challenge the arguments.
Each element on the map can be cross-related to any other element on the map; so any point can be seen in the context of any other point. And each element is described not only via the heading and roll-over text shown in the visualization above, but also via an expanded text that can be up to 50,000 characters and include images and other media. You can begin to access and explore this deeper content via the buttons displayed below the graph.
As with the other maps in the series you can you can keep up to date with developments on the Climate Change map via the Independent Minds blog and @TheIndyDebate on Twitter. And if you would like to embed the map on your own website or blog (like a YouTube video) for your own readers, you can do so using the code shown below:
<iframe src='http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.aspx?r=610&d=2&i=1' frameborder='0' width='490' height='650' scrolling='no'></iframe>
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Comments
David
The aim with the map is to develop it iteratively and collaboratively towards the point at which the best arguments across all dimensions of the debate are embodied in the map and freely and transparently available for all (whether decision makers or those impacted by the decisions).
The map is at an early stage of development, so any icy logic that you are happy to share to help strengthen the map for all will be most welcome.
David
As communism and facism were the greatest threats in the 20th century, environmentalism has the potentential to be the greatest threat in the 21st century.
Lets be clear environmentalists are not interested in the environment, they are just interested in you, your behaviour and their ability to control it. All excess as determined by the environmemntalist priesthood will be banned. A new Puritanism, by instruction, correction, pain and punishment await humanity.
Meanwhile back on earth, the planet continues to cool.
I have added your observations to the structure of the map here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
...where you and others are welcome to build on and/or challenge this line of thought.
It's in the nature of the online tools being developed for ESSENCE that all perspectives can be mapped and that the technology is neutral with respect to the content of the map.
David
This was "Cold" from mud 1940s to mid 1970s, "hot" from mid 1970s to early 2000s, "cold" from early 2000s until ........
Meanwhile our sun continues spotless. Livingstone and Penn in 2006 wrote a paper on the sun, rejected by Science, talking about the gradual disappearance of its magnetic field. Unfortunately, it is tracking very well against reality.
Look forward to serious planetary cooling over the next decade.
I agree, it is the oceans that have the greatest impact on the surface climate. CO2 is only a bit player on climate.
I have added Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Meridional Overturning Circulation to the map here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
...and cited a link to the Livingston and Penn sunspot paper as an articulation to the element here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
Please don't hesitate to flesh out the arguments and evidence on the map - and if you would like me to guide you through this process, just let me know.
David
They are all starting to get worried that in the current financial crisis their funding may come under attack if they can't keep the juggernaut rolling.
I have added your observations to this section of the map:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
...where you are welcome to elaborate on your Hansen and Rahmstorf examples.
David
I have added your tax suggestion to the map here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
...and the more that we can collaborate as a community to represent and refine all pertinent views fairly and succinctly on the map, the clearer and more useful the structure will become.
David
This is a novel, experimental approach to understanding complex public policy issues and we are learning, and seeking to improve, from all the feedback we receive.
It's a labour of love too: so cheerfulness and resilience flow naturally from the activity, as does a curiosity to understand and represent all perspectives as fairly and clearly as possible.
David
No one can avoid noticing an elephant in the room. But respectable folks somehow know it's not polite to mention that it's there.
In response to the City of Vancouver's upcoming "Greenest City in the World" initiative (it will be announced sometime this week), the Greenest Elephant in the Room is dedicated to raising the "forbidden question" of reducing the workweek.
It's the most immediate and direct way to reduce material throughput while preserving and even creating jobs. Yet even as the current economic and environmental crises make the reduction of working time more urgent, serious proposals to do so are treated as curiosities from the fringe. Why is this so?
The Greenest Elephant in the Room suspects that there are a lot of economists, politicians and other respectable folks who would rather be silly than look silly by marching out of step with their silly peers. As John Maynard Keynes remarked of bankers, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."
See Peter Victor's "Managing without Growth: Slower by design, not disaster"
I have added your suggestion to the map here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
...and cited Peter Victor's book as a source for the point.
David
This is a good observation. Human population growth is being explored in another area of the map (under the "What global strategy should humanity adopt?" Issue and the "Seek to minimise the impact of the changes" Position).
I have added a new cross-link on the map to connect the two areas directly for now; however, an observation of this kind is often a prelude to a more significant shift in the structure of the map.
You can see the new cross-link here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
David
I have added your argument to the map here:
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv_indep.a
Please don't hesitate to change the way that it has been expressed on the map.
David
So much oxygen in the atmosphere, not too much. Same with sunlight, gravity, water, ecology, temperature, place in the universe, and many other variables.
These can, and have, varied widely for completely natural reasons.
Humans have grown numerous enough that their activities effect the composition of the atmosphere and the oceans, the temperature of each, and other factors.
Humans need a narrow "window" of near perfect conditions, or we will perish, or at least suffer greatly.
Rising temperatures would allow tropical diseases to spread to wider areas, change ocean currents, affect food crop yields, alter precipitation causing droughts and floods, raise sea levels displacing coastal cities, eic.
The climate conditions if the 19th and 20th centuries were fairly good. Our population grew without consideration that these climate conditions may change radically for the worse. Much of the capital of mankind was, and is, spent waging war.
The window of conditions which allowed this population growth will not, evidence shows us,
remain unchanged.
One large volcanic eruption, or one moderate sized asteroid impact could cause a rapid worsening of climate, as happened in 1816. There was no growing season in America or Europe for 2 or 3 years, and it snowed in summer months, due to volcanic dust in the atmosphere.
The warming which has recently taken place, as shown by the vast melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, can cause an acceleration in warming by releasing the greenhouse gas
methane stored beneath the tundra and in gas hydrates in the deep ocean. Methane is several times stronger in warming than CO2.
Burning coal mined from the earth releases CO2 that was sequestered naturally in ancient times.
Many coal fired power plants are due to come online.
We cannot control volcanoes, and cannot fend off all asteroids.
We can make our survival more likely by reducing our CO2 output, planting trees, recycling plastics, metals, and eventually everything. We can reduce pollution of all kinds. We can harvest fish sustainably. We can manage forests and rivers wisely. We can desalinate water, We can use renewable power sources. We can insulate buildings to use less energy.
We can treat the Earth like out loving Mother...because she is.
Most importantly, we can stabilize, and then reduce, our population because 6 billion + people
is a very large strain on the earth's ecosystems, which we depend upon for food, water, wood, air... life. Our population cannot increase much without disaster.
We can realize that we are dependent upon, not the masters of, natural processes that provide the conditions for human life, and that the survival of humanity depends upon doing everything that we can to cooperate with each other in order to keep the window of human
survivability open, and to seek to maximize conditions which lead to quality of life, good health, and human dignity for all
Many of these thoughts are represented on the map now, and I would be glad to guide you through the process of adding any that are not yet represented.
David
http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.asp
...where you are welcome to develop the argument.
David
http://debategraph.org/default.aspx?s
On a separate point, delighted to read that Appropedia is switching to CC-BY-SA.
David