Serious questions are being raised and debated during a number of high-profile events tackling climate change at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival, which launched on Monday and runs until 26 March.
In an event happening tomorrow, Tackling climate change: whose responsibility is it? (15 March), a notable panel of experts ask whose responsibility is it to tackle climate change as we see ever more clearly its consequences? Professor Simon Redfern, Department of Earth Sciences, Craig Bennett, CEO Friends of the Earth, Dr Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey, and Dr Julian Huppert, Jesus College, discuss whether it is down to individuals, companies or nations — or all three.
Speaking ahead of the event, Dr Emily Shuckburgh said: “My years spent gathering and studying data from the Arctic and Antarctic has left me in no doubt about the seriousness of climate change.
“Global temperatures are at a new record high and we have seen repeated episodes of heatwaves, flooding and other severe weather around the world. Much of my recent research has been directed at assessing the risk of extreme weather in the future and the impact on society.
“The science is clear about the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge. Future generations will have to live with the consequences of the choices we make today. Well-thought-out actions could provide opportunities to improve people’s quality of life in many different ways. But we will only meet the challenge and achieve these advances if we each take responsibility, individually and collectively, for driving forward the response.”
On Thursday, an esteemed panel, including Lord Martin Rees, Professor Kevin Anderson and Oliver Morton of the Economist come together to discuss what changes we will need to make if we are to avoid climate chaos and meet the aspirations of the Paris Climate Agreement during the event, Cambridge climate lecture series: from cop21 to zero global emissions (16 March)
Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees believes that, “Under 'business as usual' scenarios we can't rule out, later in the century, warming that's drastic enough to trigger irreversible trends like the melting of Greenland's icecap. But governments won't prioritise action to remove this risk unless their citizens take the ethical stance that future generations matter – not just here but in the developing world too. We shouldn't 'write off' these long-term threats by applying a standard discount rate.
“The most effective and politically acceptable way to limit climate change is to promote a world-wide programme to accelerate development of new technologies for energy generation, storage and transmission. The costs will then come down more quickly, so that countries like India, which need more energy, can afford to leapfrog to carbon-free energy rather than building coal-fired power stations. And it would be hard to envisage a more inspiring challenge for young engineers than to develop effective clean energy for the developing and developed world.”
During a further event, In the pink: why penguin poo is extremely interesting (23 March), Dr Gareth Rees, part of the Scott Polar Research Institute and the British Antarctic Survey team that are developing new ways of counting penguins from space, will explain how, where and why they became world experts in the colour of penguin poo, and what this might tell us about climate change.
He said: “The ability to monitor penguins in the Antarctic is surprisingly important, because of their role in the ecology of the Southern Ocean. They are particularly keen on consuming krill, and because of this, penguins can be used as unwitting monitors of the state of the marine ecosystem in the Southern Ocean, something that is expected to respond to changing climatic conditions.
“We are working to develop improved methods for detecting the presence of penguins using satellite images. The penguins are too small, and the satellite images not generally detailed enough, for us to be able to spot individual birds in the images, but they do leave a rather characteristic message that we can see. The food they eat is eventually converted to guano, which is deposited all over the colony and has a very characteristic colour – especially when the penguins have been eating a lot of krill. We have been studying this colour in detail and believe we know enough about it now to be fairly sure that we can spot where the penguins have been, even if we can’t see the penguins themselves.”
Other related events:
- Noisy embryos: from the bane of embryology to indicators of the anthropocene (16 March) Linking Nick Hopwood’s work on the history of variation in embryology to Simon Rundle’s current use of embryos as indicators of climate change, this talk introduces Noisy Embryos, the audio-visual exhibition by Deborah Robinson and David Strang which responds to the uses of embryos in scientific research. Presented by Anglia Ruskin University.
- Meet your friendly neighbourhood climate scientists (20 March) Cambridge Centre for Climate Science invites you to join some of your local experts for an evening of short science talks, followed by a question-and-answer session.
To pre-book events, visit the Cambridge Science Festival website: www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk or call: 01223 766 766.
Visit the Festival’s twitter site @camscience #csf2017, or Facebook page cambridgesciencefestival
Cambridge Science Festival brings science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine to an audience of all ages through demonstrations, talks, performances and debates. Run by the University of Cambridge, the Festival draws together independent organisations in addition to many University Departments, Centres and Museums.
This year’s Festival sponsors and partners are Cambridge University Press, AstraZeneca, MedImmune, Illumina, TTP Group, Science AAAS, Anglia Ruskin University, Microsoft Research, FameLab, Babraham Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Napp, Alzheimer’s Research UK, The Institute of Engineering and Technology, UTC Cambridge, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge Junction, British Science Week, Cambridge Live, and BBC Cambridgeshire.
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