Pitch
Model building for America ! The Millennial way!
Description
Team
The team consists of three members, Christopher Esposo, Michael Cassady and Chao Wang, who built the model and researched the topic in their spare time.
Christopher Esposo is a Georgia Tech Graduate Student studying economics and mathematics.
Michael Cassady is a Cornell student studying computer science, mathematics and economics.
Chao Wang holds a dual masters degree in Quantitative Computational Finance and Computer Engineering. He currently works as a quantitative analyst for a major investment firm.
The team also received significant input from Anthony Cummings, who holds a dual masters degree in Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering . He is also certified to work for the national weather service. He works as a consultant at a major environmental consulting firm.
Two of the team are members of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network (http://www.rooseveltcampusnetwork.org/) , a network of student run public policy think tanks, endowed by the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Instiutions. The institute seeks out students to generate innovative policies, informed and assisted by the collective actions of 80+ chapters, and 8000+ students in the continental United States and Great Britain.
Introduction
Climate change represents a significant challenge for the world in the 21st century. The average surface temperature of the earth is anticipated to rise significantly. The earth is estimated to have already undergone a six tenths of a degree celsius raise in temperature as of 2005 due to increases in greenhouse gases (GHG). Another 1.6 degree rise is predicted over the next 50 years due to increased levels of GHG (United Nations, 9).
As the polar caps and other ice sheets melt, an accompanying rise in ocean levels may take centuries to be fully realized. Satellite imagery has helped to establish the shrinkage of ice in places as far apart as the mountains of tropical Africa and the ice sheets of Greenland (15).
The melting of Antarctica alone would cause a 57 meter rise in the ocean. A starkly smaller rise of .7 meters would accompany the melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps. However, estimates on their actual size vary by as much as a factor of 5 (14). Likewise, considerable uncertainty exists as to how much ice will eventually melt and when (15-23).
Nonetheless, even a relatively small chance of a significant rise in the ocean should be a cause of serious concern. The displacement of human populations worldwide as people sought out shelter away from the coasts would be catastrophic. In addition, national economies and global trade would likely suffer.
The world's marine life is expected to see severe turnover and extinctions. Up to 60 percent of aquatic species will go extinct (34). The combined effects of increasing acidity due to absorbed carbon dioxide and extreme weather events on the coasts is expected to cause extinction events for terrestrial animal life (36).
Moreover, there are some predictions for regions of the world. The north of Africa may be at a tipping point at the moment and may experience increased rainfall during this century to come. An increase in fertility may be also accompany this increase.
The Mediterranean region is expected to become more arid, making it vulnerable to shortages of water and becoming a desert. The southwest of North America is also expected to become more arid (39-41).
Such widespread and drastic changes could pose severe risks to global security and the stability of the economy and global trade. Furthermore, the Security Exchange Commission has mandated that publicly listed companies must disclose how changes in the climate and accompanying regulatory changes will impact business assets (Kirkland).
Background
Each day the earth receives vast amounts of energy from the sun. This energy however must eventually be emitted back into space. It is in the balancing of this energy that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and water vapor, play an important role for human life on earth.
Some of the incoming energy from the sun is immediately reflected back out into space by snow, ice and clouds. The rest must be reemitted later. But the amount that remains after immediate reflection should result in a significantly lower than observed mean temperature for the surfac e of the earth.
However, greenhouse gases act in the atmosphere to reabsorb the radiation emitted from the surface, reradiating some of it back to the surface. About forty percent escapes back out into space from the upper atmosphere where the temperature is much lower (Maeler, 39).
While other physical processes also have an impact on the balance of energy, anthropogenic sources of carbon are considered a main driver of temperature changes in the last several decades. The cycle of emission and absorption of carbon involves exchanges between the atmosphere, the sea and the terrestrial systems.
The total amount of carbon in the sea is about 50 times that in the atmosphere. At present, the exchange between the sea and the atmosphere is about zero in the net. However, the surface temperature of the water is a major factor in emission and absorption rates, with a net release of carbon from warmer, tropical seas and a net absorption from colder, polar waters (43-44).
Terrestrial plants take up carbon to form their biomass. Though about half of this is returned back to the atmosphere at night during respiration, about 60 gigatons of carbon per year is used in the net. When plants and trees die, however, their biomass decays and its carbon is released back into the atmosphere (45).
During the last 200 years of industrialization, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by approximately 32%. While studies show that carbon has also varied during the past 45,000 years, a time period during which human activities are presumably negligible, the magnitude of the change in the last two centuries is unprecedented. The recent changes are some fifty times more rapid than the observed natural variations.
An estimated eight gigatons of carbon dioxide is released by human activities and a full 40% remains in the atmosphere. Another 20% is absorbed into the oceans and 40% is taken up by terrestrial systems (48).
The politics of climate change are complicated by their international scale. The divide between developed and developing nations is significant. The developed nations emit about 3.1 tons of carbon per year per capita, while the world as a whole emits just 1.1 tons of carbon per capita.
As an illustration, suppose a target stabilization of 550 parts per billion of carbon were aimed for, then if developed nations reduced their emissions by more than half, developing nations could not afford to output more than 1.3 tons of carbon per capita due to their expected growth in population (49).
The well known Kyoto Protocols, have as a cornerstone of their compliance, a trading system that would allow participants to trade carbon credits. These are important because they could minimize the impact on economic activity, by allowing efficient reductions in carbon on a global basis.
However, in the midst of politically explosive rounds in 1997, the question of how to allocate the initial credits to market participants was not addressed (Victor, 7). This left many contentious details to be resolved, in later rounds, when time would assume a more critical role, to delay decisions without missing the important deadlines of 2008 and 2012.
The very ambitious cuts of the initial round in 1997 were drastically downsized in 2001, from 5.2 percent reductions below 1990 baselines to 1.8 percent (Karon). Nonetheless, the world's largest economy, the United States, abandoned the treaty that same year (Karon).
Even if the Kyoto protocol is implemented, questionable accounting decisions remain. For instance, nations are allowed to create their own records of how much carbon dioxide is reabsorbed by reforestation. The incentive to skew the books in order to mitigate the economic brunt of reductions could turn Kyoto into little more than political show (Victor, 8).
The model
Link to model file:
http://www.mediafire.com/?q4xzr1pesqpxnpa
Background
The current model utilized by the MIT Co-Lab competition, henceforth referred to as a “Sloan Model,” has several strengths and weaknesses. It’s main deficiency stems from the fact it does not seem to be a time-dependent dynamical model. Instead, the Sloan model seems to be predicated on the notion of computational general equilibrium.
Although this framework is widely accepted, especially amongst a significant class of economist, the model ‘s predication on the primacy of equilibrium limits its interpretive power for policy. An alternative approach, pioneered by Jay Forrestors in 1957, at MIT, focuses on the construction of a computer system dynamics simulation.
Instead of concentrating on steady-states and long-term equilibrium, these models focus on the behavior of a dynamical system, mostly in dis-equilibrium. The term “feedback loops” originates with this school of thought. The proponents of these models believe that the salient behavior is captured most aptly in these “transitionary” states. In 60 years, this subject has matured from a discipline that began as a study of ship-to-ship ballistics in the second world war, to a set of formalisms and tools that are now widely utilized by social scientists, and policy makers alike.
The class of models in this field are rich and variegated. They include a range of climate models, as well as more recent social/politio models. Jay Forrestor pioneered the first dynamical social model, in his book Urban Dynamics. In his book, Forrestor utilizes the systems formalism, and framework, to model urban culture and conflict. The model results are then used to generate a set of policy recommendations for potential governance agents.
In the tumultuous 60s, when the urban core of most cities were set ablaze from rioting, poverty, and income and racial inequality, this model provided a safe way to test-bed ideas which were not possible to implement in reality. The next model that evoked a great deal of attention was World2, built for the Club of Rome’s publication “The Limits to Growth.” This model was authored by Dennis Meadows, and others. Meadows, a graduate of MIT Sloan School, was a student Forrestor.
These two models provided the foundations for further developments in global computational modeling. Many of these sought to capture various social phenomena, including the economy, political and civic institutions, and even religion. As time has progressed, the models have only increased in complexity and sophistication. More recent approaches have included GLOBUS, SIPER, and World3, which is what the current base model for the project.
What is currently lacking in many of these models is a robust integration between social phenomena and major environmental phenomena. This project is an attempt at open source integration, using the Climate CoLab forum.
Implementation
In this section, you need to justify World3 model for our purposes, explain motivation of using our methodology, why we think it is superior to Sloan model, and how we constructed the model (calibrated etc.)
We have heavily modified and recalibrated world3 to model the United States economy and its role in climate change. This dynamic systems approach allows from the outset time dependent behavior unlike that implemented by the MIT Sloan General Equilibrium approach.
However, this model is limited by its inability to accurately model paradigm changing technology. Present understanding of innovation is sparse and any model would presumably be likewise hampered. But this shortcoming is made more acute by the ambition to produce time dependent behavior for significant time frames.
We feel however that this model may be best in forecasting a few decades forward and refitting and recalibrating to new data in the future. Moreover, the greatest strength of time dependent behavior is in modeling the complexity and interesting that the real world takes on in its states of disequilibrium. By viewing behavior over time we can capture nuances not foreseen in an equilibrium.
In porting the model to a nation state we felt that there were two major issues. We needed to account for economies outside of the United States, and their impact on the environment. . This was achieved by implementing a trade module to simulate international trading behavior. Second, the environmental module of world3 had to be disaggregated.
World3 only accounted for an aggregated notion of "persistent pollution", which would impact land deterioration, and ultimately food supply per capita. In turn, this would put pressure on family size and world population. In all of these, no mention of individual pollutants) such as carbon dioxide are taken into account Nor its’ individual impact on the environment. Further, the impact of water on agriculture, and that of forestation, on the climate are not implemented.
This abstracted view of pollution necessitated significant changes to the model.
While other model s may , provide a finer grain of detail, we feel that some factors explicitly fleshed out in these models, such as transportation mode and its impact on energy use, may not be as fruitful to specify in highly granular manner. Such socially determined aspects can easily change in structure, which would necessitate a redesign of the model. Hence, we have opted to abstract a significant amount of the physio-social processes in this model. Further, a formal program of modeling design is being developed for future iterations and attempts.
Results
This model was implemented in Stella. Accompanying pictures of results and parts of the modules are included for illustrative purposes. The model was run starting in 1980 to the year 2100. The results are those of what would happen if no action were taken to mitigate climate change.
In the year 2090, the population of the United States peaks at about 1.07 billion. By the year 2100, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reach 582 parts per million. GDP climbs upwards and in the year 2100 is 417 trillion dollars.
If run longer term, the model will show GDP peaking in 200 years. Eventually, population will fall enough to stabilize carbon dioxide near 2000 parts per million with a surface temperature some 19 degrees higher than 1980. The small population that survives will live in essential equilibrium from 375 years onward.
Going forward, the model needs additional tweaking and building out. More data and calibrating of intermediate values can help to bring results even more in line with history. The module for trade can be greatly expanded to include features such as migration, capital investment and world-wide emissions which were cut for lack of time. The environmental module will become more fine grained.
Policy
1. Believed Effect.
Historically, compliance with respect to climate change have been targeted at the institutional level. Assuming implicitly, that a small subset of a nation’s governing and civil society could more readily \ agree on climate change proposals. We believe that recent history has shown this approach to be frought with difficulty, and costly adminstratively.
We believe the only way that wide-scale compliance can occur, is to generate compliance at the individual level. Traditionally the issues of climate change have been informed by the use of computational tools, like system dynamic models. These models have been the domain of well-funded and highly educated professionals.
Over time, this has created a 2-class system of individuals. The small minority who are familiar with the models, and their sophistication, and a large and overwhelming class of individuals, who are largely ignorant of the models and it’s logics. We believe this ignorance, has allowed for apathy and skepticism to prevail amongst the general population.
Traditionally, information has been asymmetric and highly skewed towards those in a position of authority. However, the advent of cheap computing power, and the encoding of the human social networks into a digital media, has created new ways for information to flow into, and out of the population. Collective action can now be directed at the micro level, with no coercive force applied.
The team proposes a 4 point project to develop a robust and socially sound compliance mechanism:
1. Build an example of a computational social/environment model at the national level and it’s impact on climate change
2. Understand the processes of that model, and construct a formal rule set to sieve out dross from the class of models.
3. Develop better front-end software that can automate model configuration and data-inputting.
4. Implement software in readily distributed program, that can run multiple model configurations using the idle computing power of the end-user.
The team believes that as increasingly more sophisticated models are built from this process, passively or actively, it will accomplish two goals:
1. Increasing awareness and information about the climate change, and it’s possible determinents.
2. Constantlty calibrating the computational too,l to observed data, for use of forecasting and policy.
It is our belief that convergence of ideas will occur in significant subgroups in society. These cliques, which will be embedded, from the bottom up, are in a better position to ensure compliance of the protocols at a local level. Further, the process can be iterated to scale up.
Several open questions/issues will resolved after the first round has been passed. With respect to the model:
1. Total recalibration of the computational environment model
2. Greater impmenetation of trading & environment to the model.
3. Robust & detailed time-dependent results of the macroeconomy and it’s effect of the envornment 10, 20, 50, and 100 years out.
4. Discovery of any suprising behavior in the dynamical system.
5. A detailed policy report on the effects of micro-level compliance, on the national economy
This program takes the issue of climate change, and compliance, in totally unorthodox direction. However, given the past failures of institutional regimes to bring about collective action on this topic, this approach should be explored and attempted. Give the special nature of the proposed compliance mechanism, the cost of advertisement will be small, and the potential benefits, great. We hope that the Co-Lab will agree and help develop this unique idea and scale it across the country.
Works Cited
Karon, Tony. "When it comes to Kyoto, the U.S. is the 'Rogue Nation'." Time. 24 July 2001. Web. 25 September 2011.
Kirkland, Joel. "SEC Issues Climate-Risk Guidance Despite Tough Political Environment." 2010. The New York Times., 28 January 2010. Web. 27 September 2011.
Maeler, K G., and Vincent, Michael J.R., ed. Handbook of Environmental Economics. Volume 1: Perspectives on Environmental Economics. 2003. Print.
United Nations Environment Programme. "Climate Change Science Compendium 2009." 2009. Print.
Victor, David G. The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print.
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