Kevin Anderson returns to the London School of Economics

Kevin Anderson has just given a talk at the London School of Economics (LSE) about climate change and the Paris Agreement. Audio download 44.3MB mp3

For me this this is almost a case of the wheel turning a full circle. I first got to really know about climate chnage from listening to Anderson's 2011 LSE talk Going Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Exploring the void between rhetoric and reality in reducing carbon emissions. I would also recommend that podcast too.

LSE describes the event which took place last week on 4 February 2016 like this.

Speaker(s): Professor Kevin Anderson

Chair: Professor Tim Dyson

Recorded on 4 February 2016 at Old Theatre, Old Building

Despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature increase at or below 2 degrees Celsius. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upward sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between 'dangerous' and 'extremely dangerous' climate change.

Kevin Anderson will address the endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those building emission scenarios to underplay the scale of the 2°C challenge. In several respects, the modeling community is actually self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm. However, even a slim chance of 'keeping below' a 2°C rise now demands a revolution in how we consume and produce energy. Such a rapid and deep transition will have profound implications for the framing of society, and is far removed from the rhetoric of green growth that increasingly dominates the climate change agenda.

Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester.

I am really looking forward to listening to the podcast. Audio download 44.3MB mp3