Non-antropogenic global climate changes

What would you like to see in Freeciv? Do you have a good idea what should be improved or how?
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adamo
Posts: 35
Joined: Sun Nov 16, 2014 6:48 pm

Non-antropogenic global climate changes

Post by adamo »

In real life, we can divide causes of global climate changes to anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic. Current climate changes are most likely anthropogenic, but over the history of the Earth, there were a lot of sudden non-anthropogenic climate changes. I would like to set independent (regardless of player's actions) climate changes. A designer could make a scenario of Global Warming or Global Cooling and set the speed of the process.

How would it work?
Regardless of player's actions, over the time, climate constantly changes (becomes either warmer or cooler from turn to turn). With this option, what we can do is to set the speed of these changes (very slow, slow, medium, fast or very fast). So we can make a scenario with slowly warming or rapidly cooling climate - it's all up to the designer. The non-anthropogenic value is completely independent from player's action, so - obviously - warming (or cooling) a climate by player's actions simply doesn't work (though he can always speed it up).

I can imagine, that people might want to warm the climate by intentionally leaving pollution just to slow down (or reverse) the process of Global Cooling, or use nukes just to try to slow down (or reverse) the process of Global Warming (thus, trying to make so-called "Nuclear Winter"). To avoid this kind of behavior, when this option is set, there's nothing player can do to reverse it or even to slow it down (however, he can still speed up the process). In Global Cooling scenario, the urban/industry pollutions obviously appears, but simply doesn't "work" (they cannot affect the climate, but they still can make the tile ineffective). In Global Warming scenario, the nuclear fallout appears, but doesn't change the climate in any way (they just make mess around the nuked area). So:

=> if Global Warming scenario is set, a pollutions caused by players appears and does work (does have impact on climate). It's the nuclear fallout that apperas, but doesn't have impact on climate,
=> if Global Cooling scenario is set, nukes can only speed up the global winter (fallout appears and does "work"). It's the industrial pollutions, that appears, but doesn't have any impact on climate here.

Why?

This kind of game is a race with time. You already know your time is limited, because no matter what you (or other players) will do, the world head toward the catastrophe. Your time is limited - so you have to be in hurry. If you wouldn't win (either by defeating other players or winning a space race) before the whole earth becomes extremely inhospitable, you loose. Yeah, we can imagine that (with either Global Warming or Cooling scenario), all civilizations leading to catastrophe maintains legions of engineers, just to constantly change the terrain over the last few cities, but one of them will eventually launch the spaceship. We can also imagine that you win just because you left the planet just before the civilizational collapse.

How to code that?
The funniest thing is, coding this feature would be quite easy! There are already two climate factors coded into the game. It causes defined climate changes (changes the map in specific ways). What we can do is just to set this factor constant in one way or the other (and make it independent from opposite actions). There's no need to modify the behavior of the code. If we're speaking of the Global Warming, the game - from the first turn - "thinks", that there are some amount of pollutions "somewhere" on the map and act like it was true (you cannot clean them, because in reality they exist outside the map, in some sort of a "limbo"). "Real" pollutions, that may appear later, might just sped up the process. In the same way, with Global Cooling scenario, the game thinks that there's specific amount of nuclear fallouts "somewhere" (again - in reality they are in a "limbo" outside the map, just in the game memory). "Real" fallouts may just speed it up if uncleaned.

Of course, the designer must set the number of a "game-thinks-that-existing" pollutions/fallouts to determine the rapidity of non-anthropogenic changes. If we set it to 5 pollutions, we gain slowly proceeding Global Warming, but if we set it to 100 fallouts, we gain rapidly proceeding Global Cooling, etc.

Summary:
=> Global Warming: from the first turn, there's some amount (5, 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, 100... - number is set by a designer) of pollutions "somewhere" (in the game memory); later fallouts does not have impact on climate in this scenario (though additional pollutions obviously does),
=> Global Cooling: from the first turn, there's some amount (5, 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, 100... - number is set by a designer) of nuclear fallouts "somewhere" (in the game memory); later pollutions doesn't have impact on climate in this scenario (though additional fallout obviously does).
RenaudC
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Aug 12, 2019 6:47 am

Re: Non-antropogenic global climate changes

Post by RenaudC »

Hello,
Sorry to resurrect this old post...
I am quite interested by this option, evenmore if the antropogenic global climate changes are included in the game.
There are several source of information about climate change mechanims like GIEC.
The model World3 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 ) can be used to simulate impact on Earth, there is an only simulation here https://insightmaker.com/insight/1954/T ... Forecaster

Does some other players are interested ?
Does some developers are interested to work on it ? I can contribute on it...
XYZ
Elite
Posts: 432
Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:00 pm

Re: Non-antropogenic global climate changes

Post by XYZ »

I could think of volcanos as non-antropogenic climate changers...
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