The Filtnib’s Progress

Right now they’re playing a game over at the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C.

It’s called the Climate Change Wargame.

Attendees include the Director of McKinsey’s Global Institute, the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine, the Leader of Germany’s Green Party, a former majority leader of the U.S. Senate, a Harvard University lecturer and a Vice-President at Dyn-Corp.

Each player has been assigned to one of five teams: the United States, the EU, China, India, and an international team including stakeholders from Japan, Russia, and Brazil.

The idea is: it’s 2015, the climate is heating up faster than anticipated, with droughts, heavy rains, floods and other extreme weather events on the rise. 250,000 Bangladeshi refugees are camped outside India, two years after their country was ravaged by a typhoon. To prevent World War III, the UN Secretary General has called for emergency meetings between the global superpowers. The teams have two and a half days to negotiate an agreement limiting greenhouse gas emissions and establishing urgent adaptation strategies.

Sound like fun? You can get a day-by-day analysis of the game from Nature magazine reporter Jeff Tollefson’s blog.

It’s got to be good that the big brains (with big pockets) are starting to spend proper time looking at scenarios and solutions to our global dilemma. And I was cheered by Al Gore’s rallying cry last week, (watch a mini-video here) calling for 100% renewable energy. As John Timmer says over at ArsTechnica, “Going renewable in a decade may not be achievable either on the practical or political levels, but simply considering what might need to be done to get there will be essential for us to make any progress at all.”