Speaker: Dr Dave Frame, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and Department of Physics, University of Oxford

Content of the seminar

Climate change targets are usually set by reference to scenarios in which concentrations of greenhouse gases are held at elevated levels in perpetuity.

The climate response under these sorts of scenarios is very hard to quantify and turns out not to be all that relevant to policy.

An attractive alternative framing is to exploit the better-constrained relationship between cumulative emissions and peak warming in scenarios in which future generations eventually decarbonise entirely.

The benefits and limits of this approach were discussed in this seminar, and some possible future avenues for policy development sketched out.

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