Wodonga & Albury Toward Climate Health (WATCH)

This post is devoted to a comprehensive coverage of an October 2011 presentation at the London School of Economics by Professor Kevin Anderson, entitled Going Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Exploring the Voice Between Rhetoric and Reality in Reducing Carbon Emissions.

This presentation as based on Anderson’s peer reviewed paper Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world, published recently in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.  Here is the abstract for that paper…

‘The Copenhagen Accord reiterates the international community’s commitment to ‘hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius’. Yet its preferred focus on global emission peak dates and longer-term reduction targets, without recourse to cumulative emission budgets, belies seriously the scale and scope of mitigation necessary to meet such a commitment…The analysis suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2◦C. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2◦C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2◦C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.’

Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester. He has recently finished a two-year position as director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organisation, during which time he held a joint post with the University of East Anglia.

David Roberts from the website Grist has written two articles in response to Anderson’s presentation and paper: The brutal logic of climate change and The brutal logic of climate change mitigation, which make for sobering reading.

We am extremely interested in the responses of WATCH supporters and Albury-Wodonga residents to Professor Anderson’s speech and paper, and encourage you to leave your thoughts in the comments box below so we can start a local conversation about the implications of this confronting research.

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References and Further Information:

Kevin Anderson, Going Beyond Dangerous Climate Change: Exploring the Voice Between Rhetoric and Reality in Reducing Carbon Emissions, London School of Economics – Department of International Development lecture series, 21 October 2011.

Kevin Anderson & Alice Bows, Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A (2011) 369, 20–44.

David Roberts, The brutal logic of climate change, Grist, 6 December 2011.

David Roberts, The brutal logic of climate change mitigation, Grist, 9 December 2011.

Radio Ecoshock (Canada), Kevin Anderson: The Brutal Logic of Climate Change, 18 January 2012.