This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Under the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, 197 countries agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. On 8 October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will present its special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Professor Myles Allen, one of the report's lead authors and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Climate Pollutants, will discuss the findings of the paper and the implication this has on the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

About the speaker

Myles Allen is Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Climate Pollutants; Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Net Zero Carbon Investment Initiative, Oxford Martin TNC Climate Partnership and Oxford Geoengineering Programme; Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on the Post-Carbon Transition; Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and Head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the University's Department of Physics. 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 UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as Lead Author on 'Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes' for the 3rd Assessment in 2001, as Review Editor on 'Global Climate Projections' for the 4th Assessment in 2007, and as Lead Author on 'Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional' for the 5th Assessment in 2013.

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.