Open Task Group on Climate Change

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Open Task Group on Climate Change is an activity group of researchers, politicians, and stakeholders based on voluntary work. The Task Group aims to develop an agreement for global climate actions for the next ten years.

Slogan: Policy-making is too important to be left to politicians only.

Scope

What is Open Task Group on Climate Change? How is it organised? What are its main objectives? What are its main activities? What are the critical questions that it tries to address?

The answers to the questions below should be based on the following criteria:

The Task Group is open to anyone who accepts its rules.
The Task Group aims to promote any solutions and actions that are scientifically defendable. If science does not rule out one of two options, the Task Group promotes both.
Therefore, the focus of the work is not to promote a specific policy but to attack policies that are not scientifically founded.
Scientific criticism is the ultimate criterion for conclusions.
Open assessment is used to operationalise the work of the Task Group.

Intended users

Politicians in the Mexico City COP-16 meeting in 2010.
Citizens of the world.

Participants

This is an open assessment. Anyone can participate. Especially, we hope participation from the following groups:

Previous ideas about potential participants

Registered participants

If you want to join the Task Group, you can simply create a user account in Opasnet and add your name in the list:

Jouni

Rationale

Review and collect the key models, and make them available for further use. This should also include standardisation, if possible.

Climate models
Dispersion models
Economic models
Policy models
Regional and city-level models
Health models
Land use models
Legal models
Bayesian belief nets

Give training to key people in the project team (involve people that are not in the risk group)

Opasnet Base

How are the tasks identified and delegated? What does the project team do, and what is done by others? Who are the members of the project team? Who is the leader?

Result

The main task of the Task Group is to develop the Citizens' climate treaty, an action plan for global mitigation of climate change. It aims to replace the Copenhagen climate treaty that failed in the Copenhagen COP-15 meeting in December 2009.

Building an international treaty is a huge task. It must have clear a code of conduct to be successful. Also, the process must be such that it cannot be halted by a few individuals or groups, even if they are powerful. The work will be done along these principles:

The whole treaty has a large number of items. Each item will be handled and written on a separate page in Opasnet. This way, they can be worked on simultaneously by different people.
A new item can be opened if it has a clear scope and purpose. The general purpose of all items is to describe some practical tasks that the participants of the treaty will have to do after the treaty has been accepted.
It must be possible to evaluate the quality and performance of the content of an item against its purpose. The evaluation is continuous and guides the development of the content.
The suggested piece of treaty text about each item is called the result of the item.
A suggested piece of text can be removed from the result. This can be done by showing either a) that if the suggested task are done by the treaty participants, the outcome does not fulfil the performance criteria, or b) that the treaty participants are unlikely to do the task described.
If a suggested result fulfils the performance criteria, it is called and acceptable result, and it cannot be removed. Thus, it is possible to have several results at the same time. These results may even be contradictory to each other.
It is the result that is evaluated against the purpose. In addition, the item page may contain rationale including discussion about what the result should contain. Thus, each page has three main parts: purpose, rationale, and result.
If two items are independent, they are developed independently. If they depend on each other, this dependency must be explicated under the subheading dependencies in rationale. An item that affects another is called a parent, and the item that is affected is called a child.
The dependency is taken into account in such a way that the result of the child must fulfil the performance criteria conditional on the result(s) of the parent(s). It is possible that a result of a child is only acceptable with a particular result of a parent but not with other results of the parent.
The project works on voluntary basis. Everyone works either for their employers or on their free time.
Open assessment method is the ultimate criterion.
Go for the truth. You don't need a permission from anyone.
Go beyond your own role. Be bold.

Methods to spread the word

Send chain letters about specific issues, so that people who know about that can send it forward to those who know about the topic or can work on it.
Develop a hierarchical system for information flow so that key topics have responsible people who follow it and report upwards in the project management chain.
Identify groups, organisations, and individuals who were involved in the Copenhagen process. They are likely interested in getting a treaty, after all.

References