"Climate change: what science and the IPCC report have to say" by Prof Myles Allen and Dr Nick Eyre

Past Event

Date
05 February 2015, 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Location
Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

One of the key objectives of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in 2014, was to provide a comprehensive description of the science of climate change and options for adaptation and mitigation for negotiators preparing for the Paris Conference in 2015.

IPCC authors Myles Allen and Nick Eyre will explain the IPCC process, and ask whether this model of a technical panel giving “policy relevant, not policy prescriptive” advice to governments is still working. They will highlight some key findings, such as the increased level of confidence that human influence is the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th-century, the importance of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the challenges of emission reductions, but also the multiple mitigation pathways still open for achieving the goal of limiting warming to 2oC.

They will also discuss some of the things the IPCC does not do, such as specifically attributing blame for observed climate change impacts, and ask what the options are for the IPCC going forward.

Join in on Twitter #2015climate

This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fumV767GscQ


About the speakers

Professor Myles Allen is Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship and the Oxford Geoengineering Programme. Professor of Geosystem Science; Leader of ECI Climate Research Programme; and Member of the Climate Systems and Policy research cluster in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford; Head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford; and Fellow of Linacre College.

His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts.

Myles has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as lead author on Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes for the 3rd Assessment in 2001 and as review editor on Global Climate Projections for the 4th Assessment in 2007.

He proposed the use of Probabilistic Event Attribution to quantify the contribution of human and other external influences on climate to specific individual weather events and leads the www.climateprediction.net project, using distributed computing to run the world’s largest ensemble climate modelling experiments.

Myles is also a member of the US NOAA/Dept of Energy International Advisory Group on the Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Dr Nick Eyre is a Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Energy at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and Oriel College. He also leads the ECI programme on Lower Carbon Futures. He is a Co-Director of the multi-university collaboration, the UK Energy Research Centre, leading its research work on energy demand. He teaches on option on energy policy on the Environmental Change and Management MSc course.

Nick has worked as a researcher, consultant and manager on energy and environmental issues since 1984. His interests focus on energy policy, especially with respect to energy demand, energy efficiency and small scale conversion and supply. He has published extensively on energy, climate, environment and transport issues. He is co-author of a book on carbon markets.

Nick worked at the Energy Saving Trust from 1999 to 2007, initially as Head of Policy and, from 2002, as Director of Strategy. He was responsible for the Trust's work on public policy issues, business development and long term business strategy. In 2001, he was seconded to the Cabinet Office, Performance and Innovation Unit, where he was a co-author of the Government's Review of Energy Policy. He led work streams on energy efficiency and long term energy scenarios.

In 1997, he wrote the first published study on how the Government's 20% carbon emission reduction target might be delivered. He managed a large European Commission programme on the external costs of energy and was lead author of the report used as the basis for the UK Government's first estimate of the social cost of carbon.