EAPS

Houghton Lecture: Corinne Le Quéré (University of East Anglia)
Date Time Location
October 28th, 2016 9:00am-10:00am 54-915
Houghton Lecture Series: The Global Carbon Budget in a Changing Climate

"Reaching Net Zero Carbon Balance in the 21st Century"
The Paris Agreement on climate change has an ambition of balancing the global emissions and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century in order to limit climate change and its impacts. This lecture will explain the scientific understanding behind the links between global temperature change and cumulative carbon emissions, and detail the underlying time scales, amplitude of change, and uncertainties. It will present a range of model projections of climate change this century and discuss their implicit assumptions about future carbon management and future response of the natural carbon cycle to climate change. The lecture will also discuss the risks of large and non-linear responses of the carbon cycle to a changing climate (so-called ‘tipping points’) and their potential consequences. It will conclude the full lecture series by suggesting ways to support societal responses to climate change that the students might like to pursue throughout their careers.

About the Speaker
Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia (UK) where she conducts research on the carbon cycle and its interactions with the Earth’s climate. Her research has helped to determine how and why the natural carbon reservoirs are changing, particularly in the Southern Ocean. She spearheaded the development of marine carbon-cycle models with new ways to represent plankton biodiversity and ecology.

Corinne is director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and member of the Scientific Committee of the Future Earth platform for global sustainability and of the UK Committee on Climate Change. She authored several assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and leads an annual update of the ‘global carbon budget’ by the Global Carbon Project, an international effort to keep track of global carbon emissions and their fate in the environment. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.

Corinne completed a B.Sc. in physics from University of Montréal (1990), an M.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University (1992), and a Ph.D. in oceanography at University Pierre et Marie Curie (1999). She conducted research at Princeton University, at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, and at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK.

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