Greenhouse gases in the Earth system: setting the agenda to 2030
Please find below MP3 audio files recorded at this discussion meeting for the following talks and discussions.
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Professor Euan Nisbet, University of London, UK
Professor Peter Liss FRS
Dr Andrew Manning, University of East Anglia, UK
Professor Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institute for Oceanography, USA
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Euan Nisbet leads the atmospheric methane group at Royal Holloway, and focussing on the modern methane budget in both the Arctic and the Atlantic tropics. His geological work on the early Earth has been in Zimbabwe, Canada and Australia, especially in in the Belingwe greenstone belt, Zimbabwe, studying komatiite volcanism, stromatolites and early microbial evolution. He holds the Hutchison medal of the Geological Association of Canada and has given the William Smith (2003) and Fermor (2000) lectures of the Geological Society of London. Books include The Young Earth: an Introduction to Archaean Geology (Allen and Unwin), Living Earth (Harper Collins), and, on global change, Leaving Eden (C.U.P.), with later Chinese and German translations).
Ralph is a climate scientist whose research interests include climate change, changes in atmospheric composition, ocean biogeochemistry, and carbon cycling. Ralph received a B.S. in physics from Yale University in 1979, and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University in 1988. He was the first to demonstrate that the oxygen concentration of the global atmosphere is decreasing due to the burning of fossil-fuels and has directed a program to track this decrease since 1989. Since 2005 he has also directed the Scripps CO2 program which sustains the iconic record of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa and other sites, begun by his father, Charles D. Keeling. He is engaged in ongoing research to refine estimates of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide using atmospheric measurements. Ralph is an active participant in teaching and advising graduate students at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He has given keynote addresses to the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the G8 Legislators and Business Leaders Climate Change Forum, and given the Bolin Lecture in Stockholm in 2011. Keeling has received the Rosenstiel Award in marine and atmospheric chemistry, the Humboldt Research Award, and is a Union Fellow of the AGU.
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Greenhouse gases in the Earth system: a palaeoclimate perspective
Professor Eric Wolff FRS, University of Cambridge, UK
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Eric Wolff is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge. After graduating as a chemist, he has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 30 years, using them mainly to understand changing climate. Until June 2013, he worked at the British Antarctic Survey. He chaired the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which produced 800,000 year records of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core and co-chairs the international initiative to coordinate future ice core research. He has published over 150 papers, many of which have been highly cited. He chaired the Royal Society team in an RS/NAS report on climate science, published in November 2013.
The politics of the low carbon transition
Mr John Ashton CBE, Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, Uk
"John Ashton is an independent commentator and adviser on the politics of climate change. Best known as a leading climate diplomat, from 2006-12 he served as Special Representative for Climate Change for three successive UK Foreign Secretaries, spanning the current Coalition and the previous Labour Government. He was a cofounder and, from 2004-6, the first Chief Executive of the think tank E3G. From 1978-2002, after a brief period as a research astronomer, he was a career diplomat, with a particular focus on China.
He is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College. He holds visiting professorships at the London School of Economics and the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. He is a Trustee of the UK Youth Climate Coalition and Tipping Point. He is also a non executive Director of E3G."
Attributing the increase of atmospheric CO2 to historical emitters and absorbers
Professor Philippe Ciais, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France
Philippe Ciais is a senior researcher at CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) and deputy director of the LSCE (Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory). In the early 1990's, he confirmed the existence of a large sink of CO2 in the North Hemisphere terrestrial vegetation using isotopic measurements. His research interests include the carbon cycle, global change and their interactions with society. Philippe Ciais authored or co-authored more than 150 articles in A-ranking scientific journals, including many in Nature and Science. Philippe Ciais is co-chairman of Integrated Global Carbon Observations task of GEO, and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project. He acted as a lead author of IPCC AR4 and SRLULUCF reports, and coordinated several European research projects. Since 2006, he is the coordinator of the preparatory phase of ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System), a research infrastructure dedicated to monitoring the greenhouse budget of Europe and adjacent regions.
Highly contrasting effects of different climate forcing agents on terrestrial ecosystem services
Professor Peter Cox, University of Exeter, UK
Peter Cox is Professor of Climate System Dynamics and leader of the Climate Change and Sustainable Futures theme at the University of Exeter. His personal research has focussed on interactions between the land-surface and climate, including the first climate projections to include vegetation and the carbon cycle as interactive elements. Professor Cox was a lead-author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th and 5th Assessment Reports. He is also a member of the NERC Science and Innovation Strategy Board (SISB), as well as being co-chair of the international IGBP-AIMES project. He was a member of the UK Royal Society expert groups on "Ground-level ozone in the 21st century" and "Geoengineering the climate", and is currently serving as a member of the working group on "Human resilience to climate change and disasters". Professor Cox is listed as a highly-cited researcher in Geosciences (http://highlycited.com/).
Global atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes, and dangers
Dr Ed Dlugokencky, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration, USA
Ed Dlugokencky is a researcher at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Global Monitoring Laboratory. Ed has been responsible for NOAA's measurements of atmospheric methane, and their interpretation, since 1990. Currently, he is the scientific leader of NOAA's Cooperative Global Air Sampling Network, a network of about 60 globally distributed sites where weekly air samples are collected then analyzed for a suite of long-lived greenhouse gases and related species in Boulder, Colorado, USA. His research is focused on using NOAA's high-quality atmospheric observations to constrain the global budgets of atmospheric methane and other species that influence climate.
Warming up, getting sour, losing breath: ocean biogeochemistry under change
Professor Nicolas Gruber, Institut fuer Biogeochemie und Schadstoffdynamik, Switzerland
Biography not yet available
Constraints on annual emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide
Professor Corinne Le Quéré FRS, Tyndall Centre, University of East Anglia, UK
Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Tyndall entre for Climate Change Research. She conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. Professor Le Quéré was author of the 3rd, 4th and 5th (ongoing) Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She co-Chairs the Global Carbon Project, a non-governmental organization that fosters International research on the carbon cycle and publishes annual updates global emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide.
Professor Le Quéré is originally from Canada. She completed a PhD in oceanography in University Paris VI (1999), an M.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University and a BSc in physics from University of Montréal. She has conducted research at Princeton University in the United States and at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.
Greenhouse gases emission reductions in Europe until 2020 by more than 20% - reality or fiction?
Professor Ingeborg Levin, Universitaet Heidelberg, Germany
Ingeborg Levin studied Physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg later gaining her PhD at the Institut für Umweltphysik, University of Heidelberg. She then went on to become a Researcher and in 1986 became Head of the Carbon Cycle group at the Institut für Umweltphysik. Ingeborg Levin was awarded Venia Legendi for Physics, and approval as Privatdozentin in August 1994. In 2005, she was approved as Außerplanmäßige Professorin by the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Ingeborg Levin's main research interests are the study of the biogeochemical cycles of long-lived greenhouse gases and their recent and past changes using isotope tracer measurements and global and regional modelling.
Sources, sinks, and distribution of sea-surface pCO2: role and magnitude of sub-mesoscale processes
Professor Marina Lévy, LOCEAN-IPSL, CNRS, France
After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, Marina Lévy prepared her PhD thesis on the oceanic carbon cycle in the Mediterranean Sea at the University of Paris 6. In 1998, she worked under a post-doctoral fellow-ship at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and obtained, in 1999, a permanent position at CNRS. She was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2004 for her pioneering work on the interactions between sub-mesoscale physics and phytoplankton productivity. Her approach combines numerical modelling, satellite data and field observations. She is now head of the Bio-Physical Interactions group at the Oceanography and Climatology Laboratory LOCEAN in Paris. She is PI of the project TANGGO (Toward AN eddying Global Green Ocean) which aims at improving the predictability of primary production, and involves over 25 institutes. She is a regular visiting scientist of the Earth Simulator Center, in Yokohama, Japan and of the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, India.
The scale of the decarbonization challenge
Professor David MacKay FRS, DECC and University of Cambridge, UK
David MacKay was appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) on 1st October 2009. The Chief Scientific Advisor's role is to ensure that the Department's policies and operations, and its contributions to wider Government issues, are underpinned by the best science and engineering advice available. David MacKay studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, then went to Caltech to complete a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems. In 1992 he returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. In 1995 he became a university lecturer in the Department of Physics, where he was promoted in 1999 to a Readership and in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2009. David MacKay's research interests include reliable computation with unreliable hardware, and communication systems for the disabled. He believes that what the climate-change discussion needs is clear, simple numbers, so that we can understand just how big our challenge is, and not be duped by wishful thinking. His book on the subject (Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air: David MacKay, UIT Cambridge, 2009) has received endorsements from all sectors and from all political parties; The Economist called it "a tour de force", and The Guardian called it "this year's must-read book".
The challenge of estimating regional emissions from observations
Dr Alistair Manning, Met Office, UK
What have we learned from carbon isotopes and O2/N2?
The growing priority for understanding greenhouse gases in a policy perspective
Professor Martin Manning, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Professor Martin Manning has worked across many areas of science including: theoretical physics, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change science broadly. From 2002 to 2007, Martin was Director of the Working Group I Technical Support Unit for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which produced the Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change for governments and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been author of more than a hundred peer reviewed papers and reports as well as more than twenty chapters in books on climate change, four of which were major IPCC reports to governments. As the inaugural Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, he led the most comprehensive interdisciplinary study carried out so far on New Zealand's capacity to adapt to climate change.
Ground-based total column measurements of greenhouse gases using the solar absorption spectrometry
Professor Justus Notholt, University of Bremen, Germany
Prof. Dr. Justus Notholt graduated in Solid State Physics at the University of Kassel in 1985. In his diploma thesis he studied the structure of amorphous semiconductors using X-ray spectroscopy. He received his PhD degree in Physical Chemistry at the same University in 1989 in the field of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering, working in the area surface science and electrochemistry. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Research Centre of the EC in Ispra/Italy, he switched to atmospheric science where he advanced a DOAS-system for simultaneous measurements of atmospheric trace gas and aerosol concentrations. In September 1990, he moved to the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research. There he began atmospheric trace gas observations in both Polar Regions and developed measurement and analysis techniques for using the moon as infrared light source during the polar night. Furthermore he started ship borne FTIR measurements to obtain the latitudinal variability of atmospheric trace gases. In April 2002 he obtained a professorship at the University of Bremen. His activities now comprise development and application of spectroscopic observations from the microwave via the infrared to the visible spectral region, using ground-based and satellite instruments. Scientific topics are greenhouse gas observations, stratospheric and mesospheric studies, and sea-ice remote sensing.
Reducing uncertainties in future terrestrial carbon sinks: an approach using process models and data assimilation
Dr Peter Rayner, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France
Peter Rayner studied theoretical physics at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his doctorate from the same university in 1991 for his studies on glacial-interglacial cycles. In 1989 he was awarded a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Division of Atmospheric Research (DAR) which included a one year stint at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. In 1991, Peter joined the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University where he began his research on the global carbon cycle. In 1994, Peter joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology (CRC-SHM) as a member of DAR. In 2004 he moved to the Laboratory for the Science of Climate and Environment in France. In 2002, Peter was awarded the Priestley Medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographical Society, the major research award in this field within Australia. In 2004 he was noted by Essential Science Indicators as among the top percentile of cited authors in the Earth Sciences. He has published over 70 papers in leading journals and has contributed to the last 3 IPCC reports.
The equities of measurement
Sir Crispin Tickell, University of Oxford
Sir Crispin Tickell KCVO GCMG is a leading international authority on climate change and environmental issues. The holder of over twenty honorary doctorates, a senior government advisor, and member of numerous committees and working parties, his areas of expertise range from Global Warming to Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Objects. Businesses, scientists and academic institutions throughout the world have benefited from his wisdom and practical analysis.
Having worked extensively on projects concerned with climate change, population, and biodiversity, Sir Crispin has advised Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, for whom he served on two task forces.
Monitoring and interpreting the ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2
Professor Andrew Watson FRS, University of Exeter, UK
Andrew Watson is an Earth System scientist, with a special interest in the processes controlling atmospheric CO2 and oxygen concentrations, and their connection to the Earth's climate. He has contributed to a wide variety of topics, including the atmospheres of other planets, physics and biogeochemistry of the oceans, paleoclimatology and astrobiology. His research group at the University of Exeter specialises in making and interpreting ocean and atmosphere measurements to high accuracy. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003.
Quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from atmospheric measurements: a critical reality check for climate legislation
Professor Ray Weiss, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA
Ray Weiss is a Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry and Associate Dean at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He holds a BS in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in earth sciences from Scripps. His career has been devoted to the use of chemical and isotopic measurements to study natural processes in the oceans, lakes and the atmosphere. Among his principal research accomplishments are: the first experimental proof of the existence of deep-sea hydrothermal vents; using dissolved atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons to determine the rates of ventilation, transport and mixing processes in the deep ocean and in deep lakes; discovery of the global rates of increase and distributions of atmospheric nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases; and calibrating the global abundance of the atmospheric hydroxyl radical, the atmosphere's primary cleansing agent. Professor Weiss is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Geophysical Union. He leads the measurement component of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an international program to trace and model the emissions, global distributions and atmospheric lifetimes of a wide range of anthropogenic and natural greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances.
The critical role of fine grained measurements in determining transport, sources and sinks of climatically important atmospheric species
Professor Steven Wofsy, Harvard University, USA
Greenhouse gases in the Earth system: setting the agenda to 2030 https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2010/greenhouse-gases-2030/
Scientific discussion meeting organised by Professor Euan Nisbet, Professor Peter S. Liss FRS, Dr Andrew C. Manning and Professor Ralph Keeling.