Two climate change conferences are taking place this week: the UN forum in Bali, Indonesia and a second meeting gathering animated creatures on an island in cyberspace.
PARIS: Two climate change conferences are taking place this week: the United Nations forum in Bali, Indonesia and a second meeting gathering animated creatures on an island in cyberspace. Make no mistake — the online meeting, hosted by the highly respected British publisher of scientific journals, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), is serious stuff.
It’s the venue, Second Life, that is unexpected. A 3-D online environment that counts nearly seven million members, Second Life features its own currency, virtual gambling and sex, as well as a handful of magazines — staffed by real journalists — which report on the parallel world’s news.
Avatars, as the personae of Second Life followers are called, can head to the conference on Second Nature, the virtual island run by NPG, via (slurl.com/secondlife/SecondNature/218/213/28).
NPG’s speakers in coming days are Tara LaForce of Imperial College in London, an expert on carbon capture and storage; Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change; and George Monbiot, journalist and author of “How We Can Stop the Planet From Burning.”
Climate change is a burning issue on Second Life, where a debate has been raging about the “carbon footprint” of avatars, the organisers say.
Some fans of Second Life calculate per-avatar pollution at 75 kilowatt-hours per year, or roughly the equivalent of 39 kilos of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the real world’s atmosphere every year. That may seem like a lot of wasted electricity, but it pales in comparison to the amount of dangerous greenhouse gases generated by the roughly 10,000 delegates attending the UN conference.
A round-trip ticket from London to New York is more than 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per passenger. “Joining the debate on Second Nature is certainly more environmentally sound than jumping on a plane to the Indonesian island where the official conference is taking place,” Nature said, last Tuesday, tongue-in-cheek.
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