Global Climate Change: A Summary for Policymakers
A lecture series by Professor Myles Allen (Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford), co-hosted by the Oxford Geography Society and the Oxford Climate Society.
Time & Date: Hilary Term 2019 - 2-3pm on Monday 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th & 8th weeks; and 2-3pm on Fridy 2nd and 7th weeks (14, 25 & 28 January, 4, 11, 18 & 25 February and 4th March)
Venue: Lecture Theatre, School of Geography and the Environment
This 8-lecture course by Professor Myles Allen, our Society's Senior Member, has been laid on in response to an Oxford Climate Society open letter in March 2018 requesting greater coverage of the issue of anthropogenic climate change for University undergraduates. It is optional, not part of any examined degree course and open to undergraduates from all subjects. Feedback on the course content and level from a broad range of students will be helpful in the development of proposals for future changes to undergraduate curricula.
Target audience: the aim is a course open to everyone. Human geographers and humanities students are very welcome: lectures will use GCSE-level maths only where essential (tools listed below), and exercises will require the use of an Excel-based integrated assessment climate model. Natural Sciences students may find it helpful to familiarise themselves with some basic macroeconomics, although I will try to work from first principles. No advanced reading is expected, but I recommend David Archer on the physical science, William Nordhaus on economics and David McKay on mitigation options, to be read alongside the lectures if you are interested.
Motivation: Thanks to the procrastination of your predecessors, the generation born around the turn of the millennium has a lot of climate policy ground to make up. Will policies in future be informed by evidence, or expediency? Having served on several cycles of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I’m struck by how even specialist climate negotiators understand specific topics in remarkable detail, interspersed by disconcerting gaps (rather like many Oxford undergraduates). Most of you will end up involved in climate negotiations in some capacity, even if only with sceptical friends, colleagues or relatives, so I’ve designed this course to cover the common ground that I believe every climate negotiator should know.
The emphasis will be on treating the world as a single unit, focussing on global drivers, aggregate impacts and generalised mitigation options. If you are interested in climate change impacts and adaptation options for a specific region, or a particular suite of low-carbon technologies, you probably already know more about them than I do.
Lecture outline: The first four lectures will focus on the physical system, stripped to the minimum needed to understand the policy implications of different greenhouse gas emission pathways. A common theme will be the need for common understanding rather than relying on “consensus science”, a concept that has unhelpfully politicised how many people see institutions like the IPCC. The next three lectures cover key aspects of global climate policy from the perspective of mainstream economics (for better or for worse, rational expectation theory still informs much current climate policy).
Lectures 2-8 will be linked by a simple Excel-based climate and integrated assessment model, and you’ll be given a number of optional exercises to do with it in your own time to make sure you’ve understood the core concepts. You won’t need to do any programming, but you will need to install and work with Excel, or an open-source equivalent. You are encouraged to work in pairs using shared laptops for lectures 2-7, but you will need an individual installation for lecture 8.
Students with GCSE-level maths may want to remind themselves beforehand how simultaneous equations work. It would also helpful for you to look up exponential and logarithmic relationships, and what dX/dt means (where X is some quantity, like global temperature, that changes over time). The only statistics we will use will be linear regression (fitting data to a straight line as a method of finding relationships and testing hypotheses).
This course is not associated with any exam, but Geography students planning to answer questions on anthropogenic climate change in Prelims Earth System Processes or Geographical Controversies; or FHS Earth System Dynamics or Environmental Geography may find the material helpful.
Background reading:
David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf: The Climate Crisis, an introductory guide to climate change, Cambridge University Press, 2009
David Archer: Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast, 2nd Edition, John Wiley, 2011 (supported by a fully-developed on-line course. Text available on
https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/Forecast_2ed/text_2ed.textonly.pdf)
William Nordhaus: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, Yale University Press, 2013
David J.C. MacKay. Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. UIT Cambridge, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9544529-3-3. Available free online from https://www.withouthotair.com. (brilliant, although missing a crucial chapter on carbon capture at source)
Time & Date: Hilary Term 2019 - 2-3pm on Monday 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th & 8th weeks; and 2-3pm on Fridy 2nd and 7th weeks (14, 25 & 28 January, 4, 11, 18 & 25 February and 4th March)
Venue: Lecture Theatre, School of Geography and the Environment
This 8-lecture course by Professor Myles Allen, our Society's Senior Member, has been laid on in response to an Oxford Climate Society open letter in March 2018 requesting greater coverage of the issue of anthropogenic climate change for University undergraduates. It is optional, not part of any examined degree course and open to undergraduates from all subjects. Feedback on the course content and level from a broad range of students will be helpful in the development of proposals for future changes to undergraduate curricula.
Target audience: the aim is a course open to everyone. Human geographers and humanities students are very welcome: lectures will use GCSE-level maths only where essential (tools listed below), and exercises will require the use of an Excel-based integrated assessment climate model. Natural Sciences students may find it helpful to familiarise themselves with some basic macroeconomics, although I will try to work from first principles. No advanced reading is expected, but I recommend David Archer on the physical science, William Nordhaus on economics and David McKay on mitigation options, to be read alongside the lectures if you are interested.
Motivation: Thanks to the procrastination of your predecessors, the generation born around the turn of the millennium has a lot of climate policy ground to make up. Will policies in future be informed by evidence, or expediency? Having served on several cycles of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I’m struck by how even specialist climate negotiators understand specific topics in remarkable detail, interspersed by disconcerting gaps (rather like many Oxford undergraduates). Most of you will end up involved in climate negotiations in some capacity, even if only with sceptical friends, colleagues or relatives, so I’ve designed this course to cover the common ground that I believe every climate negotiator should know.
The emphasis will be on treating the world as a single unit, focussing on global drivers, aggregate impacts and generalised mitigation options. If you are interested in climate change impacts and adaptation options for a specific region, or a particular suite of low-carbon technologies, you probably already know more about them than I do.
Lecture outline: The first four lectures will focus on the physical system, stripped to the minimum needed to understand the policy implications of different greenhouse gas emission pathways. A common theme will be the need for common understanding rather than relying on “consensus science”, a concept that has unhelpfully politicised how many people see institutions like the IPCC. The next three lectures cover key aspects of global climate policy from the perspective of mainstream economics (for better or for worse, rational expectation theory still informs much current climate policy).
- How rising carbon dioxide levels cause global warming. This lecture covers why some trace gas molecules interact with outgoing energy; how radiating-panes-of-glass analogies can be dangerously misleading; and how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations still have an impact on outgoing energy even after the atmosphere as a whole has become essentially opaque to infrared radiation. Click here to access the slides for this lecture. | Click here to access an additional explainer by Myles Allen on the greenhouse effect.
- How global temperatures respond to a changing atmosphere. This lecture focuses on how the oceans (where most of the energy “trapped” by rising greenhouse gases ends up) determine the timescales on which surface temperatures respond to a planetary energy imbalance; why the long-term equilibrium response is particularly uncertain; and why this means that some climate policy goals make much more sense than others. This lecture will introduce a simple Excel-based climate model that you can use to understand key concepts. Click here to access the slides for this lecture.
- Quantifying human influence on global climate and weather. This lecture explains how we estimate the anthropogenic contribution to the observed increase in global average temperature, aiming to counter the popular misconceptions that this evidence depends either on complex climate models or on indirect observations of past climate based on tree-rings and ice-cores. We’ll discuss how rising global temperatures affect the probability of extreme weather events, and what this might mean for the attribution of harm to past emissions. Click here to access the slides for this lecture.
- The fate of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and other climate drivers: Should we all go vegan to address climate change? This lecture explains why net anthropogenic CO2 emissions need to be reduced to zero to halt the rise in global temperature, putting paid to the once-popular idea of “contraction and convergence” to a “sustainable” per-capita CO2 emission rate. We’ll also discuss how other climate pollutants behave, including methane, nitrous oxide and aerosols, and why the concept of “CO2-equivalent emissions”, although deeply embedded in almost all climate policy discussions, can be misleading. Click here to access the slides for this lecture. | Click here to access the Excel worksheet for this lecture.
- Global impact functions and the social cost of emissions. This lecture will explain how we assign a present monetary value to the future climate impacts of today’s greenhouse gas emissions, emphasising the importance of scenarios; equity and welfare; the notion of discounting future harms and benefits; bottom-up versus top-down, and model-based versus empirical, approaches to quantifying global economic impact; and dealing with uncertainty and risk. We’ll discuss the challenge of monetising irreversible impacts such as species extinction, including the (special?) case in which the species in question is Homo Sapiens. Click here to access the slides for this lecture.
- The benefits, costs and challenges of emissions reductions: 12 years to save the planet? This lecture begins from the economic benefits of burning fossil carbon, and the consequent challenges of reducing emissions. We will look at global drivers of emissions in “shared socio-economic pathways”; compare marginal and total costs of different approaches to reducing emissions; and introduce you to cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis and the importance of non-monetary barriers and incentives. Click here to access the slides for this lecture. | Click here to access the Excel worksheet for this lecture.
- Climate policy options. We’ll begin from the current climate policy landscape and the status of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change following the Paris Agreement. We will discuss carbon pricing, cap-and-trade, cap-and-dividend and regulatory approaches to reducing emissions, and the ethical and practical challenges of relying on adaptation or remedial measures like albedo geo-engineering. Your lecturer has strongly-held and not-particularly-mainstream views on climate policy, so unlike lectures 1-6, this will not pretend to provide a balanced overview: you are invited to bring your own views along to provide balance. Click here to access the slides for this lecture.
- Interactive capstone exercise and opportunity for feedback. This will be an opportunity for you to design your own climate policy for the 21st century, using the Excel tools introduced in lectures 2-7, and present it back to your lecturer. Details will be provided in lecture 1. Click here to download the instructions for the exercise. | Click here to access the Excel worksheet for the exercise.
Lectures 2-8 will be linked by a simple Excel-based climate and integrated assessment model, and you’ll be given a number of optional exercises to do with it in your own time to make sure you’ve understood the core concepts. You won’t need to do any programming, but you will need to install and work with Excel, or an open-source equivalent. You are encouraged to work in pairs using shared laptops for lectures 2-7, but you will need an individual installation for lecture 8.
Students with GCSE-level maths may want to remind themselves beforehand how simultaneous equations work. It would also helpful for you to look up exponential and logarithmic relationships, and what dX/dt means (where X is some quantity, like global temperature, that changes over time). The only statistics we will use will be linear regression (fitting data to a straight line as a method of finding relationships and testing hypotheses).
This course is not associated with any exam, but Geography students planning to answer questions on anthropogenic climate change in Prelims Earth System Processes or Geographical Controversies; or FHS Earth System Dynamics or Environmental Geography may find the material helpful.
Background reading:
David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf: The Climate Crisis, an introductory guide to climate change, Cambridge University Press, 2009
David Archer: Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast, 2nd Edition, John Wiley, 2011 (supported by a fully-developed on-line course. Text available on
https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/Forecast_2ed/text_2ed.textonly.pdf)
William Nordhaus: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, Yale University Press, 2013
David J.C. MacKay. Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. UIT Cambridge, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9544529-3-3. Available free online from https://www.withouthotair.com. (brilliant, although missing a crucial chapter on carbon capture at source)