Final Cambridge Climate Lecture Series 2024
Fri 15 Mar 2024 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Babbage Lecture Theatre, CB2 3QZ
Description
In this final lecture of the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series 2024, young people from Finland Operaatio Arktis will discuss the melting of the Arctic with Senior Editor Oliver Morton and assess if there can be 1.5 °C without intervention or not. Note this event is also part of the Cambridge Festival.
One billion children are already at extreme risk due to global warming.
Melting Arctic sea ice is one of the most dangerous consequences of global warming. Up to 75% of Arctic sea ice volume has melted in the last forty years. Sea ice is disappearing for the first time in perhaps as little as ten years - without active intervention.
The disappearance of sea ice triggers devastating chain reactions in the natural systems that are essential for our life.
Reducing emissions quickly is critical, but it is no longer enough to ensure a safe planet. Some tipping points in the Earth system may already have been passed, and passing more will are becoming likely after 1.5 degrees of warming.
By cooling critical areas, stabilising glaciers and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, we can further potentially prevent such devastating changesthat are otherwise unavoidable under the current policy mix.
Operaatio Arktis is a project to launch a debate on climate repair in Finland and promote fair and comprehensive research on climate interventions.
About Oliver Morton
Oliver Morton is a writer and editor who concentrates on scientific knowledge, technological change and their effects. He is currently a senior editor at the Economist responsible for the magazine’s Briefing articles.
From 2009 to 2011 he was the Economist’s Energy and Environment Editor; prior to that he was Chief News and Features Editor at Nature, the world’s leading interdisciplinary science journal, supervising its journalistic output in print and online. His writing has appeared in magazines including the New Yorker, National Geographic, Discover, Time, the American Scholar, the New Scientist and Prospect, as well as in newspapers including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. His articles have been anthologised in Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing, and his only foray into science fiction was selected to appear in Year’s Best SF 11 (2006).
His first book, Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a Worldwas published in 2002 by Picador (US) and Fourth Estate (UK). It deals with scientific and other ways of understanding a place that cannot at present be visited. Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, was published by Fourth Estate in the UK in 2007. Listed as one of the “Ten Best Nature Books” in The Independent, and as a book of the year in The Spectator and the TLS, the reviewer Jon Turney wrote that it contains “everything you could possibly want from a popular science book. There is wonder here, and intellectual excitement; clear explanation and lyrical writing; and much new insight into how the world works.” He is currently working on The Deliberate Planet, a book about geoengineering.
Location
Babbage Lecture Theatre, CB2 3QZ