Marchus Jochum (University of Copenhagen). The future of ocean modelling. We can only trust current Earth System Models with future projections if they are able to reproduce past events. I will use model realisations of glacial inception and Dangaard-Oeschger events to illustrate what aspects of current ESMs are trustworthy and which ones need more work.... View Article
Description The oceans are critically important to our planet. In addition to the obvious uses of oceans as a food source and biodiversity resource, oceans have a range of major influences on our planet. For instance, they have a major impact on weather and climate. They also critically influence human activity on shorter time scales.... View Article
Important lessons regarding current and future climate change trends can be derived from the paleo-climate record. Particularly from abrupt events such as the Oldest dryas (~16 kyr), Older dryas (~14 kyr), Younger dryas (12.9–11.7 kyr) and the ~8.2 kyr Laurentian ice melt event all of which occurred over time-scales of a few decades to a few years.
At present, the most important strategy to avert such consequences would be investment in CO2 down-draw measures and the channeling water from flooded to desiccated regions, such as from northern Australia to the Murray-Darling basins
Rob Chadwick (Met Office UK) Future projections of tropical precipitation show large uncertainties at the regional scales relevant to climate change impacts. In order to narrow this uncertainty and produce robust, useable information for climate change adaptation, the mechanisms that drive regional precipitation change in the tropics must first be understood. In particular, the response... View Article
Coastal ecosystems such as seagrass beds and seaweed communities are facing rapidly changing ocean conditions due to ocean warming, ocean acidification and eutrophication. The three speakers will talk about different approaches to understand the effects that the projected future ocean conditions will have on seaweeds and seagrasses, including omics techniques and field and laboratory based... View Article
Myles Allen (University of Oxford) Achieving Net Zero — Solving climate change without carbon taxes and with a little help of the fossil fuel industry
Craig Bishop (University of Melbourne) This seminar introduces the “replicate Earth” ensemble interpretation framework, based on theoretically derived statistical relationships between ensembles of perfect models (replicate Earths) and observations. We transform an ensemble of (imperfect) climate projections into an ensemble whose mean and variance have the same statistical relationship to observations as an ensemble of... View Article
Neil Craik (University of Waterloo) While the Paris Agreement does not address the issue of climate engineering (CE) expressly, the target of limiting global average temperature rise to “well below” 2°C and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increases to 1.5°C”, (a goal that appears unlikely to be achieved in the absence of significant amounts... View Article
Adrian Luckman (Swansea University). Larsen C Ice Shelf: Melt, ponding, ice-dynamics and the birth of a one trillion tonne iceberg In 2017, one of the largest icebergs ever recorded broke away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. This talk covers the work of a team who spent years studying the ice shelf and... View Article
Somini Sengupta (New York Times) At a time when the majority of the world’s population is urban, climate change presents grave new risks for the world’s cities and forces city folks to figure out how to survive. Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for The New York Times, considers the scale of the problem and the... View Article