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/ Events

Feedbacks on climate in the Earth system

08 - 09 December 2014 09:00 - 17:00

Scientific discussion meeting organised by Professor Eric Wolff FRS, Professor John Shepherd CBE FRS, Dr Emily Shuckburgh and Professor Andrew Watson FRS

Event details

The response of Earth’s climate system to a perturbation depends on the sign and strength of several feedback processes. This meeting will present critical assessments of major feedbacks, including those (such as ice sheets and the carbon cycle) operating over long timescales. For each, their role in past and present climate change, and their expected future effects will be discussed.

The draft programme (PDF) is available to download. Biographies of the organisers and speakers are available below, and speaker abstracts will be made available closer to the meeting date. Recorded audio of the presentations will be available on this page after the event and the papers will be published in a future issue of Philosophical Transactions A.

Attending this event

This event has already taken place. Recorded audio of the presentations can be found below.

The meeting was immediately followed by a related, two-day satellite meeting, Climate feedbacks - setting the research agenda, at the Royal Society at Chicheley Hall, home of the Kavli Royal Society Centre.

Enquiries: Contact the events team

Organisers

  • Professor Eric Wolff FRS, University of Cambridge, UK

    Eric Wolff is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge. After graduating as a chemist, he has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 30 years, using them mainly to understand changing climate. Until June 2013, he worked at the British Antarctic Survey. He chaired the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which produced 800,000 year records of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core and co-chairs the international initiative to coordinate future ice core research. He has published over 150 papers, many of which have been highly cited. He chaired the Royal Society team in an RS/NAS report on climate science, published in November 2013. 

  • Professor John Shepherd CBE FRS, University of Southampton, UK

    John Shepherd is a Professorial Research Fellow in Earth System Science in the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton. He has worked on a wide range of environmental issues, including the transport and deposition of atmospheric sulphur dioxide, the dispersion of tracers in the deep ocean, the assessment and control of radioactive waste disposal in the sea, the assessment and management of marine fish stocks, and the ocean’s role in climate change.  He was the first Director of the Southampton Oceanography Centre from 1994-1999, and from 2001-10 was a Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and awarded a CBE in 2010. He was a member of the DEFRA Science Advisory Council for seven years and chaired the DECC Science Advisory Group from 2009 to 2013. He has been involved as a member or reviewer in several of the Society’s science policy studies and chaired the study on Geoengineering the Climate in 2009. More recently he has been involved in preparing several public documents on climate science including the Royal Society Summary of the Science and the recent joint RS/NAS briefing document.

  • Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Cambridge Zero and Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge

    Dr Emily Shuckburgh is Director of Cambridge Zero at the University of Cambridge and Reader in Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. She is a mathematician and climate scientist and a Fellow of Darwin College, a Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy and a Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey.

    Dr Shuckburgh leads the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER). Until April 2019 she led a UK national research programme on the Southern Ocean and its role in climate (ORCHESTRA), and was deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team and head of the Data Science Group at British Antarctic Survey.

    In the past she has worked at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at MIT. She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and co-chair of their Climate Science Communications Group. She has also acted as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Environment Research Council.

    In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for services to science and the public communication of science. She is co-author with HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper of the Ladybird Book on Climate Change.

  • Professor Andrew Watson FRS, University of Exeter, UK

    Andrew Watson is an Earth System scientist, with a special interest in the processes controlling atmospheric CO2 and oxygen concentrations, and their connection to the Earth’s climate. He has contributed to a wide variety of topics, including the atmospheres of other planets, physics and biogeochemistry of the oceans, paleoclimatology and astrobiology. His research group at the University of Exeter specialises in making and interpreting ocean and atmosphere measurements to high accuracy. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003.