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Please find below MP3 audio files recorded at this discussion meeting for the following talks and discussions.
Professor Euan NisbetOrganiser
Professor Peter Liss FRSOrganiser
Dr Andrew Manning, University of East Anglia, UKWhat have we learned from carbon isotopes and O2/N2?
Professor Ralph KeelingOrganiser
Dr John Ashton, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UKThe politics of the low carbon transition
Professor Philippe Ciais, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, FranceAttributing the increase of atmospheric CO2 to historical emitters and absorbers
Philippe Ciais is a senior researcher at CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) and deputy director of the LSCE (Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory). In the early 1990's, he confirmed the existence of a large sink of CO2 in the North Hemisphere terrestrial vegetation using isotopic measurements. His research interests include the carbon cycle, global change and their interactions with society. Philippe Ciais authored or co-authored more than 150 articles in A-ranking scientific journals, including many in Nature and Science. Philippe Ciais is co-chairman of Integrated Global Carbon Observations task of GEO, and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project. He acted as a lead author of IPCC AR4 and SRLULUCF reports, and coordinated several European research projects. Since 2006, he is the coordinator of the preparatory phase of ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System), a research infrastructure dedicated to monitoring the greenhouse budget of Europe and adjacent regions.
Professor Peter Cox, University of Exeter, UKHighly contrasting effects of different climate forcing agents on terrestrial ecosystem services
Dr Ed Dlugokencky, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, USAGlobal atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes, and dangers
General Discussion
Professor Nicolas Gruber, Institut fuer Biogeochemie und Schadstoffdynamik, SwitzerlandWarming up, getting sour, losing breath: ocean biogeochemistry under change
Introductions
Professor Corinne Le Quéré, University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic SurveyConstraints on annual emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide
Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and researcher at the British Antarctic Survey. She uses numerical models and data analysis to quantify the interactions between marine ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles and climate for time scales going from one to several hundred thousand years. She co-chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who co-ordinate international research on the global carbon cycle. This group published annual CO2 budgets since 2005 and identified the very fast growth in CO2 emissions in recent years and their underlying drivers.
Professor Ingeborg Levin, Universitaet Heidelberg, Germany Greenhouse gases emission reductions in Europe until 2020 by more than 20% - reality or fiction?
Ingeborg Levin studied Physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg later gaining her PhD at the Institut für Umweltphysik, University of Heidelberg. She then went on to become a Researcher and in 1986 became Head of the Carbon Cycle group at the Institut für Umweltphysik. Ingeborg Levin was awarded Venia Legendi for Physics, and approval as Privatdozentin in August 1994. In 2005, she was approved as Außerplanmäßige Professorin by the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Ingeborg Levin's main research interests are the study of the biogeochemical cycles of long-lived greenhouse gases and their recent and past changes using isotope tracer measurements and global and regional modelling.
Professor Marina Lévy, LOCEAN-IPSL, CNRS, France Sources, sinks, and distribution of sea-surface pCO2: role and magnitude of sub-mesoscale processes
After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, Marina Lévy prepared her PhD thesis on the oceanic carbon cycle in the Mediterranean Sea at the University of Paris 6. In 1998, she worked under a post-doctoral fellow-ship at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and obtained, in 1999, a permanent position at CNRS. She was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2004 for her pioneering work on the interactions between sub-mesoscale physics and phytoplankton productivity. Her approach combines numerical modelling, satellite data and field observations. She is now head of the Bio-Physical Interactions group at the Oceanography and Climatology Laboratory LOCEAN in Paris. She is PI of the project TANGGO (Toward AN eddying Global Green Ocean) which aims at improving the predictability of primary production, and involves over 25 institutes. She is a regular visiting scientist of the Earth Simulator Center, in Yokohama, Japan and of the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, India.
Professor David MacKay FRS, University of CambridgeThe scale of the decarbonization challenge
David MacKay FRS is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. He is author of the critically acclaimed book, "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air".
Dr Alistair Manning, Met Office, UKThe challenge of estimating regional emissions from observations
Professor Martin Manning, Victoria University of Wellington, New ZealandThe growing priority for understanding greenhouse gases in a policy perspective
Professor Justus Notholt, University of Bremen, GermanyGround-based total column measurements of greenhouse gases using the solar absorption spectrometry
Prof. Dr. Justus Notholt graduated in Solid State Physics at the University of Kassel in 1985. In his diploma thesis he studied the structure of amorphous semiconductors using X-ray spectroscopy. He received his PhD degree in Physical Chemistry at the same University in 1989 in the field of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering, working in the area surface science and electrochemistry. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Research Centre of the EC in Ispra/Italy, he switched to atmospheric science where he advanced a DOAS-system for simultaneous measurements of atmospheric trace gas and aerosol concentrations. In September 1990, he moved to the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research. There he began atmospheric trace gas observations in both Polar Regions and developed measurement and analysis techniques for using the moon as infrared light source during the polar night. Furthermore he started ship borne FTIR measurements to obtain the latitudinal variability of atmospheric trace gases. In April 2002 he obtained a professorship at the University of Bremen. His activities now comprise development and application of spectroscopic observations from the microwave via the infrared to the visible spectral region, using ground-based and satellite instruments. Scientific topics are greenhouse gas observations, stratospheric and mesospheric studies, and sea-ice remote sensing.
Dr Peter Rayner, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, FranceReducing uncertainties in future terrestrial carbon sinks: an approach using process models and data assimilation
Peter Rayner studied theoretical physics at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his doctorate from the same university in 1991 for his studies on glacial-interglacial cycles. In 1989 he was awarded a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Division of Atmospheric Research (DAR) which included a one year stint at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. In 1991, Peter joined the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University where he began his research on the global carbon cycle. In 1994, Peter joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology (CRC-SHM) as a member of DAR. In 2004 he moved to the Laboratory for the Science of Climate and Environment in France. In 2002, Peter was awarded the Priestley Medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographical Society, the major research award in this field within Australia. In 2004 he was noted by Essential Science Indicators as among the top percentile of cited authors in the Earth Sciences. He has published over 70 papers in leading journals and has contributed to the last 3 IPCC reports.
Sir Crispin Tickell, University of OxfordThe equities of measurement
Sir Crispin Tickell KCVO GCMG is a leading international authority on climate change and environmental issues. The holder of over twenty honorary doctorates, a senior government advisor, and member of numerous committees and working parties, his areas of expertise range from Global Warming to Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Objects. Businesses, scientists and academic institutions throughout the world have benefited from his wisdom and practical analysis.
Having worked extensively on projects concerned with climate change, population, and biodiversity, Sir Crispin has advised Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, for whom he served on two task forces.
Professor Andrew Watson FRS, University of East AngliaMonitoring and interpreting the ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2
Andrew Watson is a Professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and has recently been appointed a Royal Society Research Professor for the 2010 anniversary of the Society. He researches the global carbon cycle, and the processes that affect Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide, both through earth history and on the modern, human-disturbed planet. He studied planetary atmospheres at the University of Michigan, before returning to the UK and working at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, where he developed tracer techniques that enabled large scale ocean experiments to study mixing, gas exchange, and the role of iron as a limiting nutrient. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of NERC council, and recipient of the European Geophysical Union's Nansen medal for achievements in marine science.
Professor Ray Weiss, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USAQuantifying greenhouse gas emissions from atmospheric measurements: a critical reality check for climate legislation
Ray Weiss is a Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry and Associate Dean at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He holds a BS in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in earth sciences from Scripps. His career has been devoted to the use of chemical and isotopic measurements to study natural processes in the oceans, lakes and the atmosphere. Among his principal research accomplishments are: the first experimental proof of the existence of deep-sea hydrothermal vents; using dissolved atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons to determine the rates of ventilation, transport and mixing processes in the deep ocean and in deep lakes; discovery of the global rates of increase and distributions of atmospheric nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases; and calibrating the global abundance of the atmospheric hydroxyl radical, the atmosphere's primary cleansing agent. Professor Weiss is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Geophysical Union. He leads the measurement component of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an international program to trace and model the emissions, global distributions and atmospheric lifetimes of a wide range of anthropogenic and natural greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances.
Professor Steven Wofsy, Harvard University, USAThe critical role of fine grained measurements in determining transport, sources and sinks of climatically important atmospheric species
Dr Eric Wolff, British Antarctic Survey, UKGreenhouse gases in the Earth system: a palaeoclimate perspective
Evening events 1 Jul
Public exhibition 2 - 7 Jul
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