Chief Scientific Advisor
to the United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(DEFRA). http://youtu.be/Yaf0DGVAJAg - Highlights: we're probably not going to hit the 2°C target, and we can't
even rule out a 5°C world. Research suggests that every 1C warming
increases the risk of extinction for 10% of all species. Even if that's a
4-fold overestimate, it's still a profound result. Events that are
already occurring at only 0.8°C above pre-industrial: wildfires, more
intense hurricanes, droughts, the July 2012 Greenland melt, accelerating
polar ice loss, arctic sea ice decline, ocean acidification, etc. It
seems that even 2°C isn't "safe". There is a new understanding of
aerosol forcings, which might increase the total anthropogenic radiative
forcing from previous estimate ~1.6 W/m^2 to something more like 2.1
W/m^2. The last part of the talk is about finding ways to build a broad
coalition of support for improving the efficiency and robustness of our
infrastructure while we simultaneously try to decarbonize and feed more
people with increasingly less food productivity. Sir Robert Watson also
spoke at a session "The Anthropocene: Confronting the Prospects of a +4°C World." That is a 12 minute talk, starting at about 1hr 3min into
the recording. |
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