Month: September 2014

Reflections on the UN Climate Summit in New York

By Dr Simon Buckle,  Grantham Institute

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”

Climate change was not, so far as I know, one of the issues that Shakespeare wrote about, despite plays like “The Tempest” or (for the sceptically minded) “Much Ado about Nothing”.  But King Henry V’s lines in Act III of the play of that name could have been written for the UN Secretary General to deliver at the Climate Summit in New York on 23 September where, with the help of a VIP cast, he in effect also urged us to “stiffen the sinews” to address one of the defining issues of our age.  

Feasibility and affordability of reducing greenhouse gas emissions

By Ajay Gambhir, Research fellow on mitigation policy at the Grantham Institute

The United Nations Climate Summit 2014, to be held in New York on 23rd September, comes at an important point in the calendar for discussions on how to address climate change. Next year will see nations submit pledges on their future greenhouse gas emissions levels, as part of the United Nations process culminating in the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) in Paris at the end of 2015, the ambition of which is to secure a global agreement to tackle climate change.

There is now a rich body of evidence on the implications of mitigation at the global, regional and national levels.

Ocean heat uptake – checking the facts

The Climate and Environment at Imperial blog has moved. View this post on our new blog 

By Dr Flora Whitmarsh, Grantham Institute

The recent slowdown in global temperature rise has led to suggestions that global warming has stopped. In fact, the Earth system is still gaining heat, and the slowdown was likely caused by a series of small volcanic eruptions, a downward trend in the solar cycle, and increased heat uptake of the ocean. Writing in the Telegraph, Christopher Booker claims that a new paper by Professor Carl Wunsch (Wunsch, 2014) shows that ocean warming cannot explain the slowdown because the deeper ocean is in fact cooling rather than warming.