Call to join the Open Task Group on Climate Change

Scope

To motivate people to participate in the Open Task Group on Climate Change.

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 from all over the world 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 kilogram of carbon dioxide that is emitted today will cause trouble for decades. And you only need to drive 5 km to emit a kilogram of carbon dioxide.

The climate system 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. Recycle. 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. (Jouni puts the for sale sign to the car and cycles away)

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. Burning wood instead of oil sounds like a good idea. But poor burning produces methane that is even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Only good knowledge can prevent us from doing these mistakes.

Second, there are a lot of things that nobody can do alone. You cannot start using a bus if there are now buses running. And buses don't run until people use them. Much more difficult is to get an international tax on carbon. Still, concerted actions are desperately needed. We need large agreements to actually make these happen.

The researchers in Copenhagen said loud and clear that the rich countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 % before 2050. What would you do if you had to live with only one fifth of the fossil energy you spend today?

Well, you can't make it alone. The whole society must change. And this is why it is very tricky. If people stop buying 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 in many places, there are no alternatives to cars.

Therefore, we must solve many problems at the same time using concerted actions. We must solve the unemployment, the bus services, and even the way we think about moving from one place to another. And all these things must happen at the same time. Different things must happen in many countries at the same time. We live in a global 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 how they will be. You predict what will happen if you decide to do something, compared with some other decision. 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. This is also the case with climate change.

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 adaptation capacity, wisely.

What is a model then? It is simply a quantitative description of some important things in the world. I'll show you a simple example. I am planning to give up my car but I am not sure.

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. These are the costs of keeping and driving the car. And finally, I need one node in my model 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. I have the quantitative estimates of this diagram on this other piece of paper. The assessment advices me to sell the car.

Pieta: Hey dad, you don't have a node about how much WE give value to the car in the model.

Jouni: Gee, you are right. We should add that into the model. You tell me your valuation, and I'll add it to the model. (They look at the calculations.)

This is the updated model. It is now based on what we call a participatory process. Assessors are rarely the right people to tell which things and which valuations should be included in an assessment. So, who should participate when we decide about the future of our planet? Everyone, especially young people.

Even with a simple model, we need truthful information about our topic. It is often difficult to find. With a complex model, it almost certainly would need more information than is available. It is said that we live in an information society. Let's look at what that means.