Calculator for anonymous users
jro...@up-to-date.ch
John,
Personally, I would prefer CO2 plus two energy fields. It would be great if you could use something similar to the carbon footprint edit screen without a submit button but with total fields. In my view, this would be better than just 1 carbon stamp, but 1 carbon stamp is better than nothing and certainly very easy to use ;-)
The main purpose should be to get people interested in tracking their footprint. Hopefully others can add good ideas how this could be achieved!
Juerg
Original message:
Given that you don't think the results need to be saved (well at least not initially), I am thinking of adding a calculator page which is basically the same as most of the other web offerings in that the calculations are done immediately using client side javascript (assuming this can be done cleanly under drupal.
So if this is OK, the next question is how should this work? You suggest just 1 carbon stamp. Wow. So, are we saying, pull down list of carbon sources plus an amount field and a result field?
I was thinking of we might need to present a simple group of 4 or so carbon stamps (like the carbon footprint edit screen)? Are you looking for CO2 only or CO2 plus one or two energy fields? Could I use something similar to the carbon footprint edit screen without a submit button but with total fields?
But happy with just 1 carbon stamp.
John Ackers
It looks as if it is going to be easy to set up a table/spreadsheet
with the columns description, amount, kwh x 2 and co2. I think a
table will be tighter and cleaner than the submit form and there is no
need for lots of supporting text. The drupal ajax routines seem to do
what they should.
The only difficult bit is going to be downloading the carbon source
information into the pull down box - I may go for fixed sources on
first version or let admin select them.
But this week, I have to go up North and I will only be able to work
on this in the evening! Should have it finished by end of next week.
I hope to send you a link on Wednesday.
John
jro...@up-to-date.ch
John,
This sounds very promising for me.
BTW: I saw that you have disabled sending email on your account for the mailing list. If you did this by purpose, I thought it might be an alternative idea to host the forum on my webpage on http://timeforchange.org . The exposure to people interested in carbon footprints would probably be much higher. The reason I suggested a google group was just because I was too lazy to set up a mailing list on my own server! And I did not think about the possibility of just opening an additional forum on my website until I saw that you disabled sending emails. Google sends us about 300 to 400 people per day with questions related to global warming, carbon footprints, CO2 emission charts, etc.
What do you think would be best: a mailing list on google, a forum on google, a forum at http://timeforchange.org or maybe even a further option?
Juerg
jro...@up-to-date.ch
On the web, I have found a simple model to calculate CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and average temperature increase in relation to the world-wide CO2 emissions (current and future). The model is available as Excel sheet and based on publications from Hadley Centre in the UK.
Wouldn't it be a great feature to show on the website how a CO2 emission is related to global warming? If someone takes his personal CO2 footprint of one year, we could simply multiply it with the number of people on the Earth and calculate a first graph of CO2-concentrations and temperature increase saying: "This happens if everyone was exactly like you". (BAU scenario)
In a next step, the user could change his personal target CO2-emissions for future years (say up to 30 years ahead) and then see the effect on the above mentioned graph, again under the assumption that everyone on Earth was doing the same.
This could either be a separate drupal module or integrated into carbon footprint. For the latter, I just see the problem of using an incomplete carbon footprint as base for the calculation. This could be difficult to explain to the user. On the other hand, it could be a separate page, where people have to carry over their yearly CO2 emission manually (it would just be 1 value). This way even people who don't enter their carbon footprint could use the module.
I could in all likelihood provide all formulae and data required but I can't program it myself...
How do you think about this?
Juerg
http://timeforchange.org
John Ackers
I think that is a good idea and original!
The anonymous and instant footprint calculator could be a standalone module if it used hard coded energy and co2 metrics.
Hold off on the data, it will be two weeks before i can get to this.
(BTW slight problem, in Liverpool and have left pen drive in London so no demo of progress on this tomorrow.)
John