Ahoy, Cool Consumption Yachts! Step aboard the Transrapid Party Train! And get ready for the future of travel, brought to you by the IDEO Munich team, who decided to focus their video sketch on a family grappling with climate change by way of everyday decisions, such as how to spend money (or carbon credits) and where (and how) to travel, with the least amount of environmental harm.
In support of their vision, they consulted with Drs. Susanne Kadner and Timm Zwickel from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and received an overview of the current situation, as well as the underlying science supporting predictions for the decades to come.
They looked into such things as the Smart Grid, which gives individuals the capacity to be both energy consumers and producers, and the Super Smart Grid, which interconnects a variety of energy production technologies while stabilizing the overall availability of power, even when natural sources, like wind and sunlight, are uncertain.
They learned about the complexity of managing the trade-offs when it comes to powering various modes of transport. (Using biofuels in jets, for instance, emits steam in the atmosphere, which contributes to the formation of cirrus clouds, which creates more greenhouse warming than CO2.) In a global move to electric power, it will be much easier to convert trains than cars, as many trains are already electric, where cars require a redesign of infrastructure.
Water use will also need to shift in response to availability and need, as so much of it is now unproportionally allocated to big industries like tourism and agriculture (in non-native growing regions). The water question becomes “How do we best use what we have for the greater good?”
On a human behavioral level, they discovered the hot debate between adaptation (changing our behavior in the future based on the climate changes that will happen) and mitigation (changing our behavior now to avoid future changes in climate). Only time will tell. However, they say Nicholas Stern, of the Stern Review, argues that mitigation not only achieves a better outcome, but it also costs less in the long run.
Maybe the father in the video sums it up best? “There are plenty of options to live big without destroying the world in the process. Life’s too short.” What do you think?
What might happen if we fail to reach a global climate accord in Copenhagen? The IDEO Munich team responds with their second video, reuniting us with the same characters and scenario, but immersing us in a much dimmer view of the future. There’s no sight of Cool Consumption Yachts or Transrapid Party Trains. Sulfair replaces Greenwash Air, with a patented sulfur-shaded technology that cools the planet while passengers soar through the skies at exorbitant prices.
In order to cover the fares (and “supplemental fuel spike insurance”), we see bored but clever Leander resorting to black market trading, while his parents discuss other forms of creative financing. It seems, in this future scenario, there are no other options. No carbon credits built into the financial system. No alternative modes of transportation. And very little in the way of proactivity.
As the climate talks draw nearer, does this vision motivate you to get involved? How might we creatively engage now to ensure a more positive outcome in the years to come?
As climate change touches every aspect of our lives, how will it change us? How will we adapt? Living Climate Change is a devoted space for the most defining design challenge of our time. It’s also a place to support fresh thinking and share provocative ideas about the future.
Hosted by IDEO, a global design and innovation company, Living Climate Change aims to support conversations beyond policy and national sacrifice in order to point toward new possibilities. Moving the debate away from what we have to give up toward what we can create, this site is born from the conviction that design has a role to play in addressing the global issue of climate change. We aspire to support the conversation by asking good questions and exploring creative solutions in an optimistic and real-world way.
Living Climate Change invites you to imagine what life will be like in 20 or 30 years, as we move along a path toward reduced carbon emissions. Will the targets be reached? Which behaviors will need to change? Which will we choose to preserve?
Saving the planet... in less than a fortnight. As the Copenhagen climate summit gets underway the US says carbon emissions are a risk to public health while others seize upon alleged leaked emails as evidence global warming is not happening.
In 4 minutes, atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike provides a glimpse of the massive scientific effort behind the bold headlines on climate change, with her team -- one of thousands who contributed -- taking a risky flight over the rainforest in pursuit of data on a key molecule.
I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change. And headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. They are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science.
Recently the headlines looked like this when the Intragovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries. They wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic. And all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers, from 113 countries. It's a big community. It's such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world.
Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. And every one of those scientists is in a research group. And every research group studies a wide variety of topics. For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Nino oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels. Which is what I happen to study.
And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students, like me. And we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule. Probably never heard of it. The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion -- 10 to the 21st -- molecules of isoprene.
But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane. And because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system.
Because it's important to the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. We blow it up and look at the pieces. This is the Euphore Smog Chamber in Spain. Atmospheric explosions, or full combustion, takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car. But still we look at the pieces.
We run enormous models on supercomputers. This is what I happen to do. Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each, on minute timescales. And it takes weeks to perform our integrations. And we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what's happening.
We also fly all over the world looking for this thing. I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia. There are others. We found a global atmospheric watchtower there, in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene, and of course, other things, while we were there. This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest, from above. And this is the tower from below.
And on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us. And this plane, the model, BA146, which was run by FAM, normally flies 120 to 130 people. So maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today. But we didn't just fly it. We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule. Incredibly dangerous stuff.
We had to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements. We hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering. We have to get special flight clearance. And as you come around the banks in these valleys, the forces can get up to two Gs. And the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they're on board. So, as you can imagine, the inside of this aircraft doesn't look like any plane you would take on vacation. It's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule.
We do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule. And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule, they write one scientific paper on the subject. And out of that field campaign we'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules.
And as a body of knowledge builds up, it will form one subsection, or sub-subsection of an assessment like the IPCC, although we have others. And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections. So you can imagine the scale of the effort. In each one of those assessments that we write, we always tag on a summary. And the summary is written for a non-scientific audience. And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers, in order to make headlines like these. Thank you very much. (Applause)
