Saturday, December 13, 2014

The "Global Weirding" project

I came across a new project that tries to present the many strands of known evidence as collected by the IPCC in an interesting and new way.  It consists of conservative projection of where current climate trends are taking our society and us.   The longer we collectively ignore, the harder it's going to hit.  I myself think this is over optimistic regarding the resilience of our complex society, but that's just me.  In any event, it's worth sharing, take a look:

Global Weirding
{glowb’l-wee-erding} noun

Describes how the rise in average global temperature leads to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells to colder cold spells, more drought and intense flooding, as well as slow-onset changes such as ocean acidification and sea level rise. Also includes oddball things such as jellyfish clogging up the pipes of nuclear power plants, forcing them to shut down.
Ready! {because it's begun!}

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The "What" and "Who" of the "Global Weirding"

This is a remix of the Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5), the most comprehensive report on climate change ever produced. 


The report is dense. Stacked it is about half a meter tall. Its convincing conclusions sometimes come with potentially frightening consequences. 

In Guide to Global Weirding we have used daily data from climate simulations. We have trawled a thousand pages looking for regional impacts. We have processed a 160.000 line spreadsheet with data from economic models reacting to future political plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions. All this has been compressed to a short presentation that we hope anyone can understand and take in. 

We try to show what our future might look like if we take the IPCC AR5 Report and its conclusions seriously. And what it will take to get to a future in which we avoid dangerous climate change. 

The visualization and everything you see on this site is done by CICERO in partnership with Bengler

Environice and Mystery have filmed some short clips that you might have seen. 
The project is supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers through their call for derivative products of the IPCC. CICERO has received additional funding for the project from the Norwegian Research Council.

How

Guide to Global Weirding was produced using model data submitted to the CMIP5 model inter-comparison project, which is publicly available. The main results are consistent with the multi-model means presented by the IPCC AR5 WG2.

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