What the Collaboratorium is

The Climate Collaboratorium is an on-line forum that allows large numbers of people to work together in developing plans to address climate change.

The Collaboratorium combines:

• Open simulation modeling
• Large scale argumentation
• Group decision making

Simulation models

the Collaboratorium uses two primary kinds of models.

• Climate models
  These are model's of the world's physical systems and are used to project the impact of future greenhouse gas emissions on the world's climate. The Preview version of the Collaboratorium uses only one model, C-LEARN, which is a Web-based version of C-ROADS, a simulation of Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems that is part of the Climate Interactive effort.

The most sophisticated physical science models are known as general circulation models (GCMs), which are used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Integrated assessment models
These models assess the impact of various policies designed to address climate change.

IAMs typically include policy modules, which incorporates economic and technological variables, as well as a physical science model that is a less complex than a GCM.

The Integrated Assessment Society (TIAS) provides a good overview of this field.
In future versions of the Collaboratorium, we plan to link to other climate models and eventually move toward radically open modeling, where users will be able to modify the models used in the systemPlaceholder for discussion about the climate collaboratorium.