Abstract

The past year, 2016, was the warmest globally in records stretching back to 1850. The second warmest year was 2015 and the third warmest 2014. In recent years we have seen weather records being broken more and more often with severe heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather around the world. The risk of some of these extreme weather events has been shown to have increased as a consequence of climate change linked to human activities. In this talk I will discuss the scientific evidence surrounding the causes and consequences of climate change and the prospects for the future. Dr Shuckburgh is co-author of a new Ladybird book on Climate Change which will be published in January 2017. The book has been written with co-authors HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper, former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth.

Biography

Dr Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and is deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She holds a number of positions at the University of Cambridge (fellow of Darwin College, member of the Faculty of Mathematics, associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, associate fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy, member of the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment and fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership). In the past she has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT . She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and co-chair of their Climate Science Communications Group, a trustee of the Campaign for Science and Engineering and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She has also acted as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Envrionment Research Council.