What the Collaboratorium is
The Climate Collaboratorium is an on-line forum that allows large numbers designed to allow large groups of people to work together collaborate 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.
This introductory video describes the vision behind the Collaboratorium and the project's overall objectives.
In the Collaboratorium, people can work together to develop, assess, and select Plans.
They can also participate in Debates about key climate change issues.
And this how-to video (link to be added later) shows how you can view and comment on plans (link to be added later), vote for plans (link to be added later), create new plans (link to be added later), and contribute to debates (link to be added later).
For a list of all the ways you could get involved, go to How can you help?
For more detailed descriptions of various aspects of the Collaboratorium, go to the links below.
Return to the Climate CollaboratoriumThe 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 system.