Do Not Drop the Hot Potato: Take Control with Our Global Warming Simulator

Scientists studied the global temperature change in 1700 years, from 300 AD until now, and found that "the 2021 surface temperature was already 1.51 °F (0.84 °C) warmer than the twentieth-century average”. Currently, we are experiencing the disruptive effects of this increase in temperature, seeing more hot days and heat waves, more severe and frequent storms, increased drought, rising sea levels threatening coastal and island communities, and so on. Thus, the team aimed at creating an easy-to-use and engaging educational tool to inform the general public of the urgency of the problem and encourage actions to address the issue.

In this project, we first analyzed the correlation between the concentration of CO₂ in the earth's atmosphere and the global land-ocean temperature anomalies time series and then established a physics-based model using data from 1959-2021 to understand the influence of CO₂ emission by human activities on global warming.

Based on this model, we used five different scenarios of future global emissions from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) prepared by the United Nations The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict a wide spectrum of future global temperature anomalies from 2023-2100. The five scenarios were chosen to represent an immediate decrease in carbon emission, a slow increase followed by a decrease in carbon emission, business as usual, a rapid increase in carbon emission that levels out in 2080, and a rapid increase in carbon emission, to cover a broad spectrum of future CO₂ emission scenarios. Our model predicts that if CO₂ emission continues to grow, the temperature change is likely to reach much higher than 2 °C by 2100, which is not acceptable.

Using our model, we built a web-based simulator as an educational tool to inform the public of the urgency of reducing emissions. In this simulator, users can play with the yearly replacement rate of fossil fuels by renewables and receive an immediate visual response to the predicted mean global temperature change. The simulator suggests that even a small reduction in carbon emissions will result in significant alleviation of global warming. The steeper the reduction in carbon emission, the sooner the global temperature increase will reverse.

Finally, we compared our simulator results with the award-winning online policy simulator, C-ROADS, which was a collaborative outcome of Climate Interactive, MIT, Ventana Systems, and UMass Lowell Climate Change. Even though there are small and expected differences in the exact numbers predicted by the two models behind our simulator and C-ROADS, the trends predicted by both models are very similar and the same insights have been gained by both models. Compared with the C-ROADS, our simulator is simple, straightforward, easy to use, and takes very little time to play and understand. Thus, we conclude that our model is useful in informing young people and the general public about the impact of carbon emissions on global warming.

Our model has large uncertainty due to the many assumptions we made to simplify the problem, such as ignoring many relevant factors including land-use change emissions, other greenhouse gases, aerosol response, extraordinary weather conditions, volcanic events, etc. However, the trends predicted by our models are useful in guiding our actions to address the global warming issue.