Climate's holy trinity: how cogency, tenacity & courage could yet deliver on Paris

About the seminar:

"Winning slowly is basically the same thing as losing outright" - Alex Steffen

It’s twenty-seven years since the IPCC’s first report and a quarter of a century since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit – such heady days of international hope and optimism. Now, with 2017 waning and with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and trace our voyage of abject failure – and with humility learn lessons for charting an alternative low-carbon course.

This seminar will begin by acknowledging our collective penchant for delusion on climate change and exploring how academia has abdicated its responsibility to hold government to account, choosing instead to be complicit in maintaining a façade of mitigation. Building on a more candid foundation, the seminar will proceed to sketch out the unprecedented scale and timeframe of decarbonisation now necessary to deliver on our Paris commitments. It will conclude with a policy prospectus that could yet constitute a family of emission pathways consistent with a reasonable probability of holding the “increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C”

Three related articles:

• Reflections on the 2017 climate change negotiations (COP23)

• Negative emissions lock in carbon addiction - Science 2016

• My assessment of Paris - published in Nature. Free pre-edit at The Hidden Agenda

About the speaker:

Kevin Anderson
Professor of Energy and Climate Change
Universities of Uppsala (Sweden) and Manchester (UK)
Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research 

Website: http://kevinanderson.info
Twitter:  @kevinclimate

Kevin Anderson holds the Zennström professorship at Uppsala University and is chair of energy and climate change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) at the University of Manchester. He is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and a non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management. Kevin is research active with recent publications in Science, Nature and Nature Geosciences.

Kevin engages widely across all tiers of government (UK and Sweden) on issues ranging from shale gas, aviation and shipping to the role of climate modeling (IAMs), carbon budgets and ‘negative emission technologies’. His analysis previously contributed to the framing of the UK’s Climate Change Act and the development of national carbon budgets.

Kevin has a decade’s industrial experience, principally in the petrochemical industry. He is a chartered engineer and a fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.