What if we could move beyond politicized and polarizing sound bites about climate change to explore feasible climate solutions? What if citizens could learn which combination of mitigation strategies has the greatest potential to meet elusive international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the global level?
With financial support from Energy Efficiency Alberta, the King’s Centre for Visualization in Science (KCVS), a research centre of the King’s University, Edmonton, has now released just such a tool for free global use. The interactive electronic Design Our Climate simulation (DOCs) equips users to explore how their energy choices and other mitigation strategies can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
— READ full release in the Chemical Institute of Canada’s Canadian Chemical News magazine (8 Nov 2019) – https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/design-our-climate-simulation-a-free-interactive-program-the-world-can-use/
— Explore the simulation applet at https://climatesolutions.kcvs.ca
— Background story on the narratives project which describes the approach: https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/hewers-of-wood-drawers-of-water-pumpers-of-petroleum/
IUPAC connection:
KCVS has been working on climate change education for over a decade. A very early version of DOCs was a key part of the explainingclimatechange.com visualization site, a legacy item of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry (IYC) that focused on the role for chemistry in achieving sustainability and IUPAC project 2008-043-1-050. KCVS director Peter Mahaffy was chair of IUPAC’s Committee on Chemistry Education during IYC, and a member of the IYC global management committee. The first eight lessons build knowledge about climate change, with an emphasis on the underlying chemistry, and Lesson 9 introduces DOCs as a hopeful way of moving forward with concrete actions to mitigate climate change.