27 May 2015
SCI welcomed Prof Myles Allen to present a Public Evening Lecture on How we will eventually solve the climate change problem, on 30 April 2015.
Professor Allen presented some of the key scientific findings of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report, which demonstrate that climate change is best considered as a stock problem: how to limit the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted over the entire industrial epoch. Unfortunately, UK and EU climate policy, and the whole United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process, are still largely premised on treating it as a flow problem: how to reduce the rate of emissions in 2030 or 2050. So many of the measures being promoted in the name of climate change mitigation, such as carbon taxes, emission permits and subsidies for renewable energy, are only marginally relevant to the main problem, which is what we are going to do with the vast reserves of fossil carbon that we cannot afford to dump into the atmosphere.
Watch the video of the lecture by clicking on the screen below.
This lecture was part of our series of Public Evening Lectures for 2014/2015. For more details on upcoming and past lecture, please click on the link below.
Professor Myles Allen is Professor of Geosystem Science in the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment and Department of Physics, University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship. His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and extreme weather events. In 2009 he co-authored two papers identifying the cumulative impact of carbon dioxide emissions. He has served on the 3rd, 4th and 5th Scientific Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2010 was awarded the Appleton Medal from the Institute of Physics.
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