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Other Southampton events

Predicting our Future: Lessons from the past

Ground-floor, step-free access.
Past event - 2017
15 May 19:00-21:30
Mettricks Guildhall, 1 Guildhall Place/157 Park Walk,
Southampton SO14 7DU
Sold Out!
It's hard to imagine something powerful enough to disrupt life as we know it, but climate change represents a threat greater than experience in recent human history. Can we use information from the Earth's past to predict what is to come for our climate and planet?

Please note that this event takes places on the first floor and is not accessible for those with impaired mobility. Children are welcome.

Are climate models wrong?

Gavin Foster (Professor of Isotope Geochemistry)
There is little doubt that anthropogenic climate change is happening: the Earth is ~1oC warmer, glaciers have melted and sea levels have risen. In the face of this undeniable evidence, there has been a recent shift in the denialist community away from flat out denial to instead questioning the accuracy of predictions made by climate models. But to understand how warm our future will be you don’t have to rely solely on complex numerical simulations. In this talk I will outline what our ancient past tells us about our climate system, and what this can tell us about how warm our future will be.

Rising Tides: 1000 years of flooding in the UK

Ivan Haigh (Associate Professor in coastal oceanography at the University of Southampton)
Coastal floods are among the most dangerous and costly natural hazards. Four million people and £150 billion of assets are currently at risk from coastal flooding in the UK today. Coastal flooding is rated as the second highest risk for causing civil emergency in the UK, after pandemic influenza. Coastal flooding is a growing threat due to sea-level rise and changes in weather patterns associated with climate change. In this talk, Dr Ivan Haigh will look back at the history of coastal flooding in the UK and future changes in flooding expected over the next 100 years with climate change.
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