The public release of the first SiMCaP module is now underway as beta-distribution: You can check out the beta1.0 version of SiMCaP's EQW-PATHFINDER (see below). There are additional user-friendly modules in development (such as the QUICK-Cruncher, PDF tool, and FAIR-SiMCaP) which are scheduled for release during 2007 and 2008.

1. SiMCaP's EQW-PATHFINDER

• Did you ever want to create a greenhouse gas emissions pathway yourself?
• Have you been wondering how much emission reductions it takes up to 2050 to stabilize at 400 ppm CO2 concentrations, or limiting warming to 2°C?
• And did you ask yourself how big of an influence a different climate sensitivity assumption might have?
• Or what might happen to the climate if we wait another ten years before bringing emissions down significantly?

SiMCaP’s EQW-PATHFINDER might be the tool that you were looking for.

Download SiMCaP's EQW-PATHFINDER now.

Figure 1 – The EQW method as implemented in SiMCaP’s ‘pathfinder’ module. (1) The ‘distributions of possible emission levels’ are distilled from a pool of existing scenarios for the 4 SRES world regions OECD, REF, ASIA and ALMvi. (2) The common quantile path of the new emission pathway is derived by using a driver emission path, such as the one for fossil CO2 emissions in OECD countries. The driver path is here defined by sections of constant emission reductions (‘-x/y%’) and years at which the reduction rates change (‘I’ and ‘II’). (3) A global emission pathway is obtained by assuming that - in the default case - the quantile path that corresponds to the driver path applies to all gases and regions. (4) Using the simple climate model MAGICC, the climate implications of the emission pathway are computed. (5) Within SiMCaP’s iterative optimisation procedure, the quantile paths are optimised until the climate outputs and the prescribed climate target match sufficiently well. (see background paper for details)

2. FAIR-SiMCaP

The FAIR-SiMCaP model has been developed by Michel den Elzen, Malte Meinshausen and others. Like the EQW-PATHFINDER model, the FAIR-SiMCaP model allows to create multi-gas emission pathways for user-defined climate targets.

Figure 1 - FAIR-SiMCaP model. The calculated global emission pathways were developed by using an iterative procedure as implemented in SiMCaP’s ‘pathfinder’ module using MAGICC to calculate the global climate indicators, the multi-gas abatement costs model of FAIR to allocate the emissions of the individual greenhouse gases and the IMAGE 2.2 and TIMER model for the baseline emissions scenarios and the MAC curves (see background text for details).