Southwood Lane
N6 5EE
Night at the Museum: Climate Change
Professor Joanna Haigh, Imperial College, London
The world is warming faster than has ever been observed in the past. Overwhelmingly scientists are of the opinion that this is largely due to the effect of gases released into theatmosphere by human activities. How can we be sure of this? And what can we say about the future? This talk will look at the scientific evidence for climate change and discuss how increasing concentrations of ‘greenhouse gases’ create an imbalance in the Earth’s energy budget with impacts on temperature, sea level and weather patterns. We will see how physics is used to construct computer models to investigate past and future climate and consider what needs to be done for the world to avoid dangerous levels of warming.
Joanna Haigh is Professor of Atmospheric Physics and, until her recent retirement, Co-Director of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, at Imperial College London. For five years prior to that she was the Head of Imperial’s Physics Department. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics and the City & Guilds Institute and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and of the Royal Meteorological Society of whichshe is also a past-President. She has been a Lead Author for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and shares a Nobel Peace Prize with several hundred others for that work. She has been awarded prizes for her work on the interface between atmospheric science and solar physics and was appointed CBE for her services to physics in 2013.
Talks take place on Mondays at 7pm in the School Museum on Southwood Lane (N6 5EE). Refreshments, including wine, are available from 6.30 pm and afterwards.