The Space for Thought lecture series celebrated the completion of the New Academic Building and was supported by the LSE Annual Fund.

Chair: Dr Simon Dietz, deputy director at the Grantham Research Institute

Speaker: Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield-UCL Hazard Research Centre

Overview of ‘Seven Years to Save the Planet’ lecture

Seven Years to Save the Planet

While the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 4th Assessment Report paints a pretty bleak picture of the future, the scariest thing about it is that it may not be scary enough.

New research points not only to higher temperatures, bigger storms and more floods, but to a world in which melting polar ice drowns coastal towns ands cities across the planet, and the Earth’s crust itself joins in with more earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Is this a world we wish to bequeath to our children and their children? If not, we may have less than 10 years to do something about it.

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