Daily Archives: June 7, 2010

Climate Wiki: Climate Lab Networks

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Dear Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce Climate Lab’s public launch of Climate Lab Networks, a new online network for sharing and accessing open-source climate change information.

In 2009, Climate Lab launched http://climatelab.org, an interactive wiki website where users can collaboratively author and edit climate change information and media online.  To date the site has generated more than 250 original articles and over 350 registered users (and counting).

Building on the climate wiki, Climate Lab Networks enables partners to directly pull wiki information and media from climatelab.org into their own websites. Contributions and edits to climatelab.org are immediately available to partner sites connected to the network.  In that way, partners can contribute to building a common information resource while directly accessing and leveraging the collective knowledge, expertise, and efforts of the larger community to support their individual missions and campaigns.

Climate Lab Networks has been launched in collaboration with the Climate Institute and the Latin American and Caribbean Council on Renewable (LAC-CORE), our first NGO network partners.

To demonstrate Climate Lab Networks, the Climate Lab article on “Small Island Developing States,” for example, at climatelab.org…

… can now be accessed on our partners’ sites:

We are eager to build new partnerships using Climate Lab Networks.  For more information, I invite you to contact us and visit our website: http://climatelab.org/climate_lab/partnerships. A press release about the launch can be found on our blog: http://blog.climatelab.org/?p=611

Best regards,
Adam Tapley

–
Adam Tapley
Climate Lab
e – atapley@climatelab.org
w – +1 (202) 640-1899
t – @climatelab
climatelab.org

New Climate Business Game

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FYI, for potential use by instructors who include simulations in their classes.

Dear all,

please have a look at our new climate business game CEO2 www.ceo2-game.com.

Climate Business Leaders wanted: WWF and Allianz are calling on the internet-community worldwide to test climate business strategies online

While politics and a lot of companies are losing precious time in climate protection, every user can now play the online-game CEO2 launched by financial service provider Allianz and WWF (World Wide Fund For Nature). One can slip into the role of a CEO and show which business strategies work out to reduce carbon, reduce risks and increase the long-term profitability. The aim of the game is to identify which investments at what time will set the course for a profitable growth in the low carbon economy of the future. CEO2 shows the possible impacts of business decisions in the chemical, automobile, utility and finance industry over the next 20 year. The success of the player is measured according to the development of the stock price and the carbon emissions.

Ahead of the UN-climate negotiations politics and business are hesitant when it comes to climate change. Although according to RECIPE (Report on Energy and Climate Policy in Europe) drawn up by the Potsdam Institute for climate impact research and supported by Allianz and WWF, Europe especially could profit from climate protection if it sets the framework for middle- and long-term reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

After 2020 the window which is open for ambitious global CO2 reductions until 2050 will close entirely. The reductions are necessary to limit the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels and avoid dangerous consequences of climate change. A cost-optimal mitigation strategy for the transformation of the energy sector alone requires an increase of investments in low-emission technologies to an annual level of 400 to 1,000 billion USD by 2030, most of which would have to be provided by the financial markets and industry.

CEO2 has been developed by Allianz and WWF to show long-term connections of investment cycles and the remaining leeway for strategies and decisions in a playful way so that a broad public audience can access these issues. The game is available on www.ceo2-game.com for free. It has been developed and implemented by the Berlin communications agency LGM Interactive. The game is also promoted on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/ceo_climate_quiz/.

Best regards,

Sigrid Goldbrunner

Sigrid Goldbrunner
Pressereferentin Klima- und Finanzsektor/
Press Officer Climate and Finance

WWF Deutschland
Vertretung Berlin
Reinhardtstraße 14
D-10117 Berlin

Tel.: +49-30-30 87 42  42
Mobil: +49-151-18854804
Fax: +49 -30-30 87 42 50
E-Mail: sigrid.goldbrunner@wwf.de

http://www.wwf.de

New critique of geoengineering by Clive Hamilton

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NEW PAPER ON GEOENGINEERING

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr Strangelove was the unhinged US general who risked nuclear apocalypse by ordering a first strike against the Soviet Union. The character was modelled on Dr Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb”. In the 1990s, Teller and his colleague at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lowell Wood (a weapons researcher nicknamed “Dr Evil”), were among the first to advocate responding to global warming by transforming the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Taking control of the climate by injecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere sounds like science fiction, but there is now a powerful alliance of scientists and venture capitalists backing the idea. It’s endorsed by climate deniers in conservative think tanks, but the public remains mostly in the dark. This paper, by Clive Hamilton, explores the strange politics of geoengineering.

Read it here:

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/index.php?page=articles