MIT’s Helpful “Bathtub Climate Model”

The systems dynamics gurus over at MIT have introduced a really cool bit of climate modeling software that has found its way to policy-maker’s laptops. Called CROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator), the program digests complex data about climate and emissions scenarios, and spits out clear, easy-to-understand predictions about sea level rise, temperature, and GHG concentrations.

CROADS is remarkable because it’s designed explicitly NOT for MIT-types. Policy makers, nonprofiteers, the general public — people whose glasses are less likely to have the thickness of a Coke can — can use the tool to understand what’s happening with climate, and hold their policy prescriptions up to a quantifiable standard. That’s big. And this piece in Nature mentions that CROADS is calibrated to the big kid’s climate models, the ones operated by the IPCC. But unlike the IPCC models, CROADS can be run on a laptop — essentially making climate prediction experts out of all of us.

Also: MIT’s John Sterman — the guy who leads the school’s Systems Dynamics Group — has created this nifty and even more simplistic simulation, called the “Bathtub Climate Model.” The simulation is free, and you can play around with different GHG concentration scenarios to see what the world will look like as a consequence of each. The simulation visualizes climate as a bathtub: water in, water out = CO2 emission, CO2 absorption. Run the water faster than the absorption rate, and you’ve got overflow: climate change.

Culture can change with the introduction of disruptive tools. Not sure CROADS qualifies as “disruptive”, but it encourages thinking about climate as a simple system we’re all familiar with: a bathtub. Water going in can’t too far exceed water going out, or you’ll overflow. Everybody gets that. If that mental model of climate (and planetary systems at large) hit the mainstream, it seems totally plausible that we could move past the “is temp. rising/isn’t it rising” distractions, and agree that you can’t keep pouring in the bath water indefinitely.

Good work, MIT. Now if I can just work on getting some thicker glasses…