In conversation with Professor Easterbrook and the Hart House Student Debates & Dialogue Committee on climate action.
Overview
Last year, 2023, was by far the hottest year in human history. Wildfires burned out of control across the planet, forcing the evacuation of entire cities. Flash floods, drought, and extreme heat events were reported around the world. Tens of millions of people have been displaced and the global cost of climate impacts is estimated at $400 million per day. Yet action on climate change around the world still falls far short of targets set by the UN, and even these targets are inadequate in the face of current scientific analysis of future climate impacts. The irony is that all the clean energy technologies needed to address climate change already exist, and in many cases are already cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives, especially when you factor in the co-benefits such as cleaner air and lower healthcare costs. Governments and corporations are simply not moving fast enough to deploy them.
In this talk, a brief overview of the scientific basis for the conclusion that climate change is serious, urgent and irreversible, and an overview of the broad range of climate solutions available to us. The systemic factors that delay meaningful action on climate change, including deliberate misinformation and political lobbying from fossil fuel companies, a widespread unwillingness to acknowledge the scale of the societal transformations needed, and the deep injustice of a problem that is largely caused by the super-rich, and suffered by poor and marginalized communities will be identified and discussed.
All this should make us angry, the talk will end with some observations about the importance of our emotional response to the climate crisis, and how anger and fear can be channelled into effective action to hold our leaders to account.
Keynote
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Prof Steve Easterbrook
Steve M. Easterbrook is the Director of the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on environmental decision-making, systems thinking, and climate literacy. He received a PhD in Computing from Imperial College London in 1991. In the 1990s, he served as lead scientist at NASA’s Katherine Johnson IV&V Facility in West Virginia, where he worked on software verification for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. He has been a consultant for the European and Canadian Space Agencies, and a visiting scientist at many climate research labs in the United States and Europe.
His recent book, Computing the Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explains how the scientific community reaches the conclusion that climate change is an emergency. It tells the story of climate models, tracing their history from nineteenth-century calculations on the effects of greenhouse gases, to modern Earth system models that integrate the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land using the full resources of today’s most powerful supercomputers. Drawing on his extensive visits to the world’s top climate research labs, this accessible, non-technical book shows how computer models help to build a more complete picture of Earth’s climate system.
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