If you want to go somewhere and have no map and no idea of how to get there , chances are you will never reach the intended destination, except, maybe, due to a stroke of luck. The same can be said of running a project or implementing a strategy or an organization. One cannot put it better than the stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, Seneca , who said that "there are no favorable winds for the sailor who does not know where to go".

Science based climate education is badly needed

Faced with the challenges of the climate crisis, a working knowledge of which behaviors and products are associated with higher carbon emissions seems like a critical skill to have. At least for those of us who feel concerned by the risk of a raise in the global temperature. How can we collectively reach a consensus on the best way to tackle climate change without a common knowledge
A resent article form Columbia Business School ( Johnson et al 2004) shows that actually people are unable to accurately judge the carbon emissions associated with different behaviors, companies, and industries. The article is based on If still available, you can try yourself one of the tests at Tinyurl.com/CarbonCompetenceIt . It is interesting to note that he result are independent of  political ideology, concern for climate change or confidence in carbon knowledge.
Other research shows that actually trying to teach people the science by providing hard scientific data, does not work. The researchers presented highly educated graduate students with descriptions of greenhouse warming drawn from the IPCC’s nontechnical reports. Subjects were then asked to identify the likely response to various scenarios for CO2 emissions or concentrations. The tasks required no mathematics, only an understanding of stocks and flows and basic facts about climate change. Overall performance was poor with subjects often selecting trajectories that violate conservation of matter (Sterman and Sweeney 2002). To summarize it in the words of prof. Sterman, one of the authors, “Research shows that showing people research doesn’t work."
So, how do we get out of this pickle? Prof Sterman was one of the initiators of what can be a solution. A model of eath climate and the world economy, that brings at the fingetips of eaveryone the most up to date science ad let each user experiment with policies to se thair impact on a number of parameters, from CO2 emissions and remparutre rise, to bimpact on biodiversity or seal level rise.
The model , En-ROADS, for Energy Rapid Overview and Decision-Support is freely accessible on the web, and I will use in this project to support many of the subjects presented.
I will also try to go a bit deeper on the science below , but will try to do it in a step by step way, starting from simple aspects, and offering the possibility to explore the subjects presented at a deeper level.
The Earth's climate is driven by a number of cycles. It is a complex system increasingly impacted by human actions and decisions. Understanding the evolution of Earth's climate is at the intersection of science ( and this already reaquires a broad interdisciplinary effort), politics , economy and developmental issues and international relations

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