“More chilling is the computer modeling [the C-ROADS team] did against the current plans of every single country that is planning to do anything, and it’s not that big a group…. They took all of these current projections and ran the computer models against what is currently happening in the science. And in every single case, it showed that we are not just marginally above a catastrophic tipping point level. We are hugely, significantly above it.”
— Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, as a U.S. Senator during former Secretary of State Clinton’s Confirmation Hearing, 14 January 2009
“The C-ROADS model from Climate Interactive was used by me and other members of President Obama’s climate-change team for gaining rapid insights into the consequences of alternative greenhouse-gas-emissions trajectories for the United States and the rest of the world. I used those insights in my briefings and memos for the President on climate science and policy, and the U.S. team used them in its interactions with experts and negotiators from other countries in the discussions leading up to the pathbreaking Paris agreement in December 2015.”
— Dr. John Holdren, White House Science Advisor, 2008-2016
“This capability [of C-ROADS], had it been available to me when we negotiated Kyoto, would have yielded a different outcome”
— Tim Wirth, President, UN Foundation, and former U.S. Senator
“You have been the backbone of our analytic work here.”
— Eric Maltzer, former Climate Change Analyst, U.S. Department of State
“The results [of C-ROADS] have been very helpful to our team here at the U.S. State Department….The simulator’s quick and accurate calculation of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperatures has been a great asset to us. …I have made use of the results in both internal discussions, and in the international negotiations….”
— Jonathan Pershing, former Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, U.S. Department of State
“The tool that these folks have developed we’ve been using over the past few months to help assess the adequacy of different countries’ mitigation offers in terms of what science says, in terms of concentration levels and have found it to be extremely useful. One of the things that’s most exciting about the work that they are doing is that it’s all open platform. The methodologies, the assumptions, the inputs, all of that can be clearly viewed and can be modified based on what your assumptions are. And that provides us for the first time with a tool that can, at a non-technical level, someone like I can approach and discuss with other delegations, how does it all sum up, what we’re doing, what other countries are doing, what does it mean in 2100 in terms of concentrations, temperature change and sea level rise. And the ability to do that in an accessible way is something that is new and is very exciting and I’d encourage other delegations to take a look and come talk to us if they’d like as they start to use this tool and have questions about it and we can explain some of the ways that we’ve found it useful. So, congratulations on great work, you guys.”
— Trevor Houser, former Senior Adviser, Special Envoy for Climate Change, U.S. Department of State
“For the first time, with C-ROADS, we have a way to capture on the spot the implications of the key decisions that will be made around the follow-up to Kyoto, with sobering and powerful results.”
— Dr. Jacqueline McGlade, former Executive Director, European Environment Agency
“It’s quite important for us to discuss emissions reduction goals in terms of climate response; policy makers and negotiators need to have a reasonable sense of what a particular action will mean for global climate, when considered in the context of other actions and policies around the world.
“Previously, we would make these calculations offline. We’d download emissions projections from a reliable modeling source, input them to an excel spreadsheet to adjust for various policy options, and then enter each proposed global emissions path into a model like MAGICC to estimate the climate response. This method worked, but it was time consuming and opaque: in the end we had a set of static graphs that we could bring into a meeting, but we couldn’t make quick adjustments on the fly.
“With C-ROADS, we can adjust policy assumptions in real-time, through an intuitive interface. This makes it much easier to assess the environmental integrity of various proposed emissions targets and to discuss how complementary emissions targets might achieve a climate goal, or to evaluate how changes in an emissions targets might affect global temperature through the 21st century.”
— Negotiator analyst at US State Department